Re: [orca-list] gnu-speach?

[Alex Midence <alex midence gmail com>]

I don't know about the harshness contributing to  it being intelligible at high speed but, I do know that 
code was added to it in order to make it more intelligible at high rates of speed.  The library is called 
Sonic.  It was contributed by a man named Bill Cox.  Used to be, you couldn't crank up the speed beyond about 
3 or 400 wpm without serious degeneration in quality.  Since Bill's libsonic contribution, I've managed rates 
of 700 and even 1000 wpm and still understood what was being said much to my surprise.  

The trouble with the natural sounding voices is that they are bigger and slower because they use actual 
phonemes uttered by a real human voice.  This is how it was explained to me a long time ago.  There's another 
kind of speech synthesizer called a formant synthesizer which is where Espeak and IBM tts as well as older 
stuff like Dectalk and Doubletalk are classified as.  These don't use real human speech but rather do their 
thing programmatically reducing the file sizes and making the engine more efficient at the cost of a poorer 
quality voice.  You can crank format speech synthesizers up much faster usually than natural speech 
synthesizers and you don't get that weird little quaver in the voice like someone is shaking the speed out of 
them.  I understand this is improving though.  I  heard the vocalizer voices recently and was very impressed 
at how well they sounded at high speeds.  More like somebody on about 10 cups of coffee instead of somebody 
trying to read while riding in a car on a bumpy road.  I'm sure you can do all kinds of exhaustive research 
on the subject but this should give you a pretty rough jist.  

Me, I prefer the formant synthesizers for serious work because of their speed but I like the natural ones 
when I'm listening to a novel or some other work like maybe poetry.  The preference is probably generational 
too, I'll bet.  People who grew up with the more human voices are going to prefer those as are people who 
went blind later in life when they were more available.  People like me who remember the really crappy stuff 
from back in the 80's and early 90's are going to have preferences pretty similar to mine or, at least, not 
mind the formant synths too much.  

Alex M

-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of John Heim
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2015 9:27 AM
To: Peter Vágner; Kyle; orca-list gnome org
Subject: Re: [orca-list] gnu-speach?

It sounds more like a natural human voice than espeak but is not nearly as good at pronounciation.  It's as 
if it has a bad accent.

Sounding more natural might not be a bonus. I know a lot of people, myself included, find espeak kind of 
harsh. But people have told me that that is actually it's strength. That quality that we perceive as 
harshness is what makes espeak intelligible at very high speech rates. I don't know if that's true but it's 
true that I have espeak cranked up way faster than I have Robert on my Mac.


On 10/22/2015 07:54 AM, Peter Vágner wrote:
> Hello,
>
> If you are wondering how it sounds like then you may find the 
> following wave file interesting....
> http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/extra-synthesis-examples/lumberjac
> k.wav
>
> Greetings
>
> Peter
>
> On 22.10.2015 at 12:16 Kyle wrote:
> > This certainly looks interesting, but I'm not sure that we'll be able 
> > to use it, since if I'm reading correctly, it's heavily dependent on 
> > GNUStep, which doesn't have a screen reader to my knowledge.
> > Sent from my cookie jar
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--
John Heim
john johnheim com

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