2018-02-08 07:27:15

@50, it certainly seems like you have a grudge against me. I don't act like Gods own Stepchild -- if I did, I'd be practically preaching Christianity. My religious views are a bit complicated. Let's just say I'm 'in the middle' and leave it at that. Now, as for me googling a subject and acting arrogant about it... I only did that once. That was in another topic. And I didn't act like I was an expert on it about that subject. I haven't googled anything for this topic regarding post 47. I know that because I receive e-mails whenever a new petition is created on change.org, as I'm signed up to their mailing list. And so I've seen some very unconvincing petitions which have gotten very few signers because of their unconvincing descriptions and information. I've pasted things from the Dictionary... I'll admit that. Who hasn't, though? I'm quite sure everyone's pasted things from the dictionary on this forum once or twice... even thrice. And people usually do that when the dictionary can describe what they're trying to say better than they can at the time they wrote the post, which does not include edits. They might be angry, and so may post the definition, or a partial one, because they're too angry to rationally explain it, then might edit their post later and explain their point rationally after they've calmed down; that doesn't mean they didn't paste from the dictionary, it just means they've erased the present evidence of such. I use the word 'present' because we can't forget the wayback machine. (I'd love to learn how that works someday...)
Now, I may be arrogant sometimes. But I'm sure you were, and still do find yourself falling into that attitude sometimes. Everyone does and has. It's apart of character development. Well, OK, maturity probably factors into that too. And considering that maturity is a good 5-8 years, if not longer, depending on the person, people might form habits and might find them incredibly hard to break. As for me, I don't know why I might come across as 'arrogant'. I read a lot of things about a lot of subjects, and that might factor into things. I've taught myself about a lot of subjects, too, so that might as well.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
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2018-02-08 08:07:52

the expression doesn't mean you act like a holy roller, it means you... well, never mind. Let's just say there are other people who are quite expert in their chosen fields who can talk about that knowledge openly without sounding like you do, and I'll leave it at that.

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2018-02-08 15:39:42

@ironcross32 and Ethin

I think we've had enough of this flame war, neither one of you is accomplishing anything useful or constructive with it. So just agree to disagree and move on, please.

2018-02-08 17:16:12

Not going to blame anyone, but all I did was state a fact and boom, this shit started. Guess even my opinion is not welcome without some kind of irritating comeback that accomplishes nothing.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
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2018-02-08 17:47:33

Your opinion is don't write to that email address because some people did and nothing happened. Don't you think that if even more people did it would encourage them to do it? Also, interesting that you state your opinions by assuming somebody didn't care to read the thread.

2018-02-08 18:17:43

Exactly. If no one ever takes the initiative, nothing ever happens.

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2018-02-08 19:58:38 (edited by Ethin 2018-02-08 20:02:26)

Here's the problem with that idea of "taking initiative". Apple is not obligated to implement accessibility. They're not obligated to make their phones accessible. But we all already know that. That also means they're not obligated to add TTS voices we want. And if we send them a hundred emails, a thousand, etc.... the chance of them actually adding it is going to significantly diminish. If it doesn't earn them profit, chances are they won't add it. It's a common business aphorism for businesses like Apple: "If it doesn't earn us profit, it's not worth doing." And before you disregard my point, or begin generating points that try to invalidate i, think about what the [email protected] email address does. It sends messages to the Apple Accessibility Team, which may or may not truly care about accessibility (just because it's there doesn't mean they care). Now, my reason for stating that they might not implement the feature if we bombard them with emails is simple: these are real people, reading these emails. And if they get hundreds to thousands of emails saying, basically, "Add the eloquence TS synthesizer to iOS," they'll get annoyed and start ignoring us. That's exactly the wrong thing to do. So if we want to take initiative, a few people need to get together on Skype, perhaps, and hash out a plan of some kind, bring it to this topic, and the community can give their input. But we can't just flood their inbox with emails from hundreds of people asking the same thing. We tried that with Valve and that got us absolutely nowhere.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
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2018-02-08 20:20:06

I think a majority of the people here know how the world works, and have written to developers about accessibility issues. I'm not saying either that they care, though I have spoken to one apple rep who was very knowledgeable and did seem to, but one out of several hundred thousand employees doesn't make the image hold. I'm also not saying that its a guaranteed if we bitch loud enough. Probably the best course of action without flooding their inboxes would be to start up a petition and get as many signatures as we could get, I would say several thousand minimum, better if that number trended up to 50K. I'm not saying that will happen either, but the alternative, which is doing nothing won't accomplish anything either.

I'd sign the petition, but I'm not really feeling the need to have eloquence on my iDevices.

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2018-02-08 21:09:58

I don't have an iDevice; I have an Android. As I've said about petitions though, you've gotta be convincing. You'll never get more than 5000 signatures, tops, if your not convincing enough. smile
I'd ask you to look at petitions such as This one as a convincing one and this one as a not so convincing one if I knew they'd help, but they probably won't. (Yes, the ladder one does have more supporters, ,but plays off of propaganda and irrational fear. The description makes that quite clear with phrases like "their deadly 'guns everywhere' agenda", "hostile foreign power", "broke the law" and "betrayed our country".) And, in case anyone asks, I don't believe the "Russians interfered with our elections" bullshit. The evidence I saw on the news  (mainly, the IP address and tools they used) isn't hard evidence at all. It's like saying that you just "know" someone murdered someone else because you "remembered it happening". And normally, I'd go search for more information, but government services like the FBI use the news media as a mouthpiece so... anyway, that's a topic for another day.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
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2018-02-08 23:20:02

Well I won't go around in circles about it, you believe what you believe, I am a skeptic, a pecimist, I admit it, but what is a fact is nothing gets done if no action is taken. As in, the odds are 0. Maybe there's a 0.005% chance of it actually happening if we do get up a petition, but 0.005 is still higher than 0.

If anyone were to create such a petition, as I've said, I'll sign it.

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2018-02-09 03:47:32

as much as I don't want to discourage anyone I will say that investment vs return is most definitely a factor here. Text to speech synthesis has moved on from being simply a voice for our assistive devices and a toy for everyone else. It's become the driving force of many devices as well as future devices, been used across the phonelines long enough, and thus the focus has shifted entirely to human-sounding speech. As much as I do hate Nuance's practices and will say that Google and Deepmind have it in the bag with Wavenet, I will say that Apple has worked with Nuance on in-house tts voices that are used in siri. So text to speech is, now, first and foremost, giving voice to a device for everyone's sake. Consider responsive and fast speech secondary at this point. Am I saying Eloquence on IOS can't happen? No, not at all. But with such a small subculture of users using it, compared to everyone under the sun using Siri on their device, it would not be worth the continued royalties paid to Nuance for using yet another speech system that they own the rights to.

2018-02-09 04:21:32

Probably so. I'd like Takitron 2o to become more mainstream lol, that voice sounds so natural I literally can't tell it from the human samples

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2018-02-10 05:01:41

Honestly I don't think eloquence even belongs on any apple products, it just seems some how wrong. Its what i've always used on my pc. It belongs on windows. It does not at all belong on apple. If eloquence was ever ported to apple, I might switch to it for a few minutes, make it say some stupid stuff like harhrhrhrhrhrhrhrhrh or hawhawhawhawhawhaw, then I would get bored with it, switch back to alex, and move on with my life.

I am the blind jedi, I use the force to see. I am the only blind jedi.

2018-02-10 05:32:55

You could argue that it could be a Simbian/windows mobile thing, but it was never, ever on any Apple product. Not even the mac, at least not officially.

2018-02-10 06:37:32

Maybe someone could tweak Fred to sound more like eloquence, who knows. It would never be exact, but it might be somewhat in the ball park

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2018-02-10 10:37:49 (edited by Socheat 2018-02-10 10:41:15)

I've been reading all these, the topic seems interesting. Thing is, Apple right now is only wants money for the most part. I think when Steve still alive, he was doing a great job with the quality and usage of Apple devices. But now, Since Tim Cook take over the job from Steve, he's doing worse and worse. Feel free to hate me on this, but I saw many complains about Tim's job with Apple. You know, on Facebook page of MacRumors, whenever Macrumors posted about bugs in macOS or iOS devices, some people started to bitching about Tim. I don't know how many people on this forum agree with them, but they're right. All he wants is "Hey, I got a new product, check it out." But whenever people reported bugs or wanting something new for their OS usage, "Hell no! All I wanted is money, ya know. These features request will be considered, but I'm not sure our team will implemented."

So, if Steve were to manage Apple like before, do you think will he listen to the users request to porting something to the OS, I'd say yes. He's likely willing to listen to our request more than Tim, I think. Because he's already implemented the Accessibility features on all Apple devices, so why can't he, or I should say, his team port Eloquence into iOS or macOS devices?

Sorry for my English guys.

2018-02-10 15:09:29 (edited by flackers 2018-02-10 15:11:35)

I think the fact that jaws which has held the lion's share of the screen reader market for decades, has had eloquence as its default voice for so long says a lot. The people at FS aren't fools. If there were a better synth, or just one that most users preferred, eloquence would be a relic now. VoiceOver is mostly an accessibility feature rather than a useful  convenience for the sighted, so not having the most popular synth among the visually impaired as an option seems a little strange. I don't think anyone's suggesting it should be the default voice, and I personally wouldn't use it for that even if it were a choice, but I would like it for reading narrative text where rhythm really matters. And I think this is the crux: voices like Alex and the Siri voice do a perfectly decent job of reading dry text, so there's very little need for eloquence on an iPhone. It would be nice if it were available for Voice Dream though.

2018-02-10 17:58:18

Steve Jobs was an innovator for sure. I don't get that vibe from Tim Cook. It seems to be about the bottom dollar for him. For that matter, I see a lot of parallels between him and Satya Nadela. The only thing is, Tim Cook inherited a legacy, Satya's trying to copy everything Apple does, and look where that gets them.

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2018-02-10 20:24:10

One day Jaws will probably get rid of Eloquence, it is just a matter of time. Then again, they still keep legacy drivers even for old hardware speech synths, so that will probably take a while, however just due to the fact Eloquence will never get updated compatibility issues will eventually arise, and people will need to get used to the change.

2018-02-10 20:52:39

They keep drivers for hardware synths, but they have long-since stopped supporting them within Jaws. Even older software synths. Dectalk could technically work just fine on windows versions as current as 10. Window Eyes has always had it as a default till the day it died, and nvda has it as an addon. But Fs dumped Access32 support the first chance they got. Can we call that right? No. And I'm stepping on toes here, but while I do agree that Eloquence is the most popular synth by and large, it is, in my humble opinion a relic. I have been using Espeak, yes Espeak, for years now, and I can say it does the job very nicely. Yes, I will admit, I cooked up a custom variant. But that's the thing. You don't like the Espeak's voice, you can always manipulate it. And that's not new, as Hal let you make custom voices and interface to a synth's various parameters, Dectalk in particular. But Espeak being open sourced allows you full access to parameters. Hell, if anyone wants my custom variant, I wouldn't mind posting it up here. Rate boost it to 15% and you've got a pretty damn good voice. But I digress. As god as Eloquence has been to us as far as constant tone and all, it is not the end-all-be-all. I think Dectalk was and is better, honestly.

2018-02-10 21:48:49

Yeah sure post it, I'll check it out, can it be made to work with NVDA, or just the sapi eSpeak. I wasn't able to get custom variants working in NVDA. I don't expect it to make me convert, but I'll check it out just the same. eSpeak makes me cringe so hard it ain't even funny. Admittedly, its better on Linux.

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2018-02-10 23:19:47

I love Espeak and got used to it, people just need to give it a better chance.

2018-02-10 23:21:06 (edited by jack 2018-02-17 16:30:27)

It works on nvda. It technically does work with the sapi espeak, but the inflection control isn't as direct so it won't sound as good. At any rate, go get it
Save it without any file extension, then copy it into /synth drivers/espeak-ng/voices/v.

2018-02-11 00:02:24

hmm, not bad, though its still got that mid crackle thing going on, I don't know what that's about, but it just came with eSpeak with NVDA around 2016.2 or there abouts and has been there ever since. Sapi eSpeak does not do this, and linux eSpeak doesn't do it either, actually I think it happened when they switched it to eSpeak NG.

I don't know what it is, crackles probably not the best way to describe it, its just unpleasant and weird.

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2018-02-11 00:42:14

Something tells me it may also depend on the soundcard you're using. I know that once when I was stuck with Microsoft's generic sound driver for a time, every synth had an edgy sound, very annoying. Espeak has always always had a nice sound on my mac's soundcard, but then again the onboard speakers on that thing are probably better than most off the shelf pc's, or at least those that I've used. The old Dell Inspiren1545 with IDT audio, for example, crackled at high volume, a lot.