[DECtalk] Piper neural voices for nVDA

[Blake Roberts]

Hi all,

I want to first thank Josh for sharing on-list several days ago about 
the Piper voices for NVDA add-on. The purpose of this message is to 
share my initial impressions of Piper with members of this email list. 
Of course since every message sent to this list if automatically 
archived and publicly readable, I am also sharing these impressions with 
the entire Internet after the send button is pressed.


I have downloaded the Piper voice NVDA add-on from GITHUB and tried some 
of the voice packages available after choosing and installing them. 
Overall I am impressed with quality of some of the AI-powered voices, 
especially since Piper is currently in Beta. The Piper voice manager 
which the developer added recently makes it very easy to find, preview 
and download voices.


For anyone who has not tried Piper voices yet and interested in doing so 
in NVDA: After installing the Piper add-on, I suggest downloading the 
Arctic voice package through Piper voice manager. In my experience, the 
other English-speaking voice packages available don't currently speak 
letters or words correctly when I navigate by individual letter or word. 
For whatever reason, the Arctic voices don't have that extremely 
annoying problem most of the time. My favorite Arctic voice is BDL. The 
Piper version of that voice is, to my ears, more 
realistic/human-sounding compared to the non-AI version available through

RHVoice <https://rhvoice.org/>.


I have bookmarked the Piper GitHub page for future reference. I am 
excited about trying additional Piper neural voices and versions in the 
future as the TTS project evolves!



Blake
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