Re: [orca-list] Decent enough voice other than espeak-ng?

["John G. Heim" <jheim math wisc edu>]

I pulled a Homer Simpson on the mbrola voices. They didn't work right 
away so I gave up. So then I tried a different espeak-ng voice. I hadn't 
realized espeak-ng had so many variant voices. I'm using Gene right now. 
Over the years, I've seen a lot of people comment/complain about the 
default espeak voice being harsh. Not to criticize, espeak was an 
amazing leap forward and espeak-ng still is. But, I would have to agree 
that the default voice is a bit harsh compared to the default voice for 
jaws.  Well, I haven't used jaws for 15 years. For all I know, it has a 
great voice these days. Anyway, some of the other voices in espeak-ng 
are as smooth as that old jaws voice. Still sounds mechanical but, 
personally, I don't care about that. Jonathan Duddington once said that 
a mechanical voice can be easier to understand than a human sounding 
voice at a really fast speech rate. I think that is true.

On 2/28/22 17:16, Jason White via orca-list wrote:
> On 27/2/22 12:26, Rastislav Kish via orca-list wrote:
> > wouldn't just using another espeak variant be enough?
> >
> > There are quite lot of them and some are pretty usable.
> Has anyone here tried the Mbrola support? Mbrola is now available under 
> the AGPL version 3 licence, as I recall. If you have tried it, how would 
> you characterize the pseech quality? This may be an option if you need 
> multiple variants and the existing ESpeak variants aren't adequate for 
> any reason.
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John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim math wisc edu