[DECtalk] Intelligibility/Listenability criteria

Don Text_to_Speech at GMX.com
Sun Jul 28 07:39:32 EDT 2019


Hi Aksel,

On 7/21/2019 3:46 AM, Aksel Leo Christoffersen wrote:
> I use danish voices most of the time.
>
> For danish, I like Mette from Acapela Infovox, or Ida from the old Nuance
> Vocalizer, because they're clear, high quality, and easy to understand.
> Unfortunately, there aren't many male voices in danish. There're some, but
> they're not very good, in my upinion.

Care to speculate as to why they don't exist?  Is there some characteristic
of Danish speech that is more suited to smaller head sizes?

> For english, I like DECtalk, for most of the same reasons, except that it
> only has a bitrate of 11025 hz.

Do you hear any artifacts in the speech?  DECtalk has an antialiasing
(hardware) filter to constrain the synthesized waveform.  But, above
~5KHz that might be an issue (and, as you're commenting about female
voices, that would suggest higher f0.

How does DECtalk sound when trying to speak Danish?  Can you feed it
raw phonemes in the hope of approximating what a TTS would concoct?
Or, are the sounds that you need just not available from it?

> I don't like Eloquence very mutch. For funny things, I like TruVoice and the
> old Microsoft Voices.




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