[DECtalk] New synthesizer Gnuspeech

[Carlos Fernandez]

Actually, it wouldn't. The pronunciation at this stage is not sufficient 
to make it usable in any context, let alone a high-demand one like 
screenreading. I hope they update the system, and it generates English, 
all right, but the system is far from good.
I am also worried about the constant mentioning of NeXT in the articles 
home page. I don't yet know if this is based off some code from NeXT, 
but the fact that they recommend actually buying a computer to run an 
operating system that still undergoes Y2K bugs and is closed-source, to 
boot, makes me wonder who is doing the work on this anyway. I would 
instead throw my support behind another sample-less speech engine with 
which we are all familiar, NVSpeechPlayer. I have been working (very 
minimally, though I intend to increase my efforts) on porting this to 
GNU/Linux and other platforms. I also want to add multilingual support 
to the engine, as it can already generate a pretty good English sound.
I have seen what I would describe as a quantity before quality aspect to 
these projects, both by those who write them and those who collect them. 
While I view any speech synthesizer as a curiosity, I try to keep in 
mind the fact that the point of any engine is to be useful for some 
purpose. This usually means either naturalness of sound and fidelity to 
the true aspect of human speech or ability to function with little 
processor and memory overhead and scale to fast speeds. Those engines 
that are so old to sound extremely unnatural (take SAM from the early 
1980s, for example) get a pass from me, as they clearly didn't have the 
capabilities that more modern hardware and operating systems make 
available to newer projects. Many other sub-par engines have been 
created and discarded throughout the years (my go-to example is 
festival, which remains incapable of almost any task given it). 
Collecting these attempts, especially when they are self-described as 
first starts, is entirely counterproductive to improving the options.
I don't want to sound like I am prematurely consigning this project to 
the useless pile. The system may improve. If it does, it may be worth 
using in the future. At this stage, it is little of significance. I 
would recommend interested parties to work on the code, rather than 
attempting to use any program capable of generating some surrogate of 
speech in cases for which it is clearly inadequate.

Carlos
On 10/22/2015 17:50, Jake Gross via Dectalk wrote:
> It would be nice if this was made into an nvda addon or a sapi5 voice.
> Jake
>
> On 10/22/15, Miguel Villagomez via Dectalk <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
>> In my opinion, it sounds like a mix of Orpheus's U.S. and U.K. English
>> accent.
>>
>> On Thursday, October 22, 2015, mattias via Dectalk <
>> dectalk at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
>>
>>> sounds the tts have bad english
>>>
>>> Den 2015-10-22 kl. 14:36, skrev Tony Baechler via Dectalk:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I thought people here might be interested in reading about this
>>>> synthesizer:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuspeech/
>>>>
>>>> It's still very much in early development, but looks potentially
>>>> interesting.  There are currently two versions, one for the Mac and one
>>>> for
>>>> Linux and Unixlike operating systems.  I don't have a Mac and I can't
>>>> comment on Mac accessibility.  The Mac version comes with a graphical
>>>> application which lets you change speech parameters.  I compiled the
>>>> source
>>>> on 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04.3 Linux if anyone wants the binaries and
>>>> libraries.
>>>> If you do, please write off list to the address in my signature.
>>>>
>>>> If you're on Windows or don't want to compile from source, you're not
>>>> left out.  I'll shortly be uploading a demo in mp3 so you can hear it
>>>> actually reading a large amount of text.  Yes, it should be able to sing
>>>> from what I've gathered from the above site.  Here is the mp3 demo:
>>>>
>>>> http://classicradio.us/iso/gnuspeech_gpl.mp3
>>>>
>>>> Share and distribute the above demo as much as you want, but attribution
>>>> would be appreciated.  It's written in C and the dictionaries are in
>>>> plain
>>>> text, so they should be modifyable without the graphical application.  I
>>>> would be interested in people's opinions on this.
>>>>
>>>>
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