Topic by musicalman 2017-11-15 07:02:43 (edited by musicalman 2017-11-15 09:07:01)

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Hi all,
When the Siri voices became a big thing, there were NVDA add-ons released that would make them available with NVDA, and the American ones at least worked well. I could never get the other dialects to work, but I like the American ones most.
So now that we have IOS 11 and the Siri voices have been massively overhalled, I'm just curious how well those NVDA voices could be updated. For a start, the sampling rate would have to be increased because the new voices are 44K I believe. So they'd be the first voices in NVDA to have that sort of quality. They'd sure be nice for reading, I especially like the male as he hardly ever sounds jumpy or distracting. Maybe a bit clipped in certain words, but I really find him pleasant and cheerful to listen to, and he sounds natural to me, more often than not. And the Siri voices speed up fairly nicely too so I would use them for general navigation if the lag isn't horrible, which in IOS 11 seems to be getting a little better at least on my IPhone 7.
The reasons I don't think it would be possible are that of course it's not the most legal thing in the world. And also, I imagine the version of Vocalizer used by IOS has been updated a lot since the NVDA driver was, so you'd somehow have to deal with that. And if Apple's claims to have used artificial intelligence to make the voices more natural-sounding are true, and if those algorithms have nothing to do with Vocalizer, then there's that to contend with, though I suspect that Vocalizer may still play a big role in it, simply because the new voices can still do a lot of the expressive things the old ones could, just the new ones sound more natural and are of higher quality in everyday use.
So, what do you guys think? I'm curious especially from a development standpoint what it would take to get these into NVDA. I'm not begging or insisting that it be done, I'm just really curious as to what it would take, and I at least have not yet seen this discussed.

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Reply by GrannyCheeseWheel 2017-11-15 17:19:21

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They are rather nice, I don't like the male one though, he sounds geeky.

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Reply by serrebi 2017-11-15 19:04:31 (edited by serrebi 2017-11-15 19:04:55)

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The next time there is a iOS jailbreak it could be possible. Not until then, though.

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Reply by musicalman 2017-11-15 19:11:07

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Serrebi, good to know. I thought Jailbreaks had something to do with it.
And yeah Ironcross, I can see where you're coming from with the male. On the other hand I don't like the female because she sounds like she is trying to seduce me a bit.

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Reply by Chris 2017-11-15 19:25:19

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Someone would also have to find or create an updated Vocalizer driver for NVDA.
Could the voice data be taken from macOS? I'd love to use the new female U.S. voice with NVDA and VoiceOver on macOS.

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Reply by GrannyCheeseWheel 2017-11-16 01:52:48

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yeah the female sounds like she's playing chaste, when all she wants to do is get you in the sack and start goin' at it doggy style or something, its weird in a way.

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Reply by x0 2017-11-16 20:21:40

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even the iOS10 voices won't work, I'm jailbroken on iOS10 and I ripped the siri data, brought it into this driver that onj has that supports the other dialects, though they cannot coexist with the default vocalizer voices because conflicting versions, and tried loading it up. Immediately errors started coming out in the log. They seem to be on version 1.5 on iOS10. We're on 1.1, that dll is probably 1.2 or 1.3. And you can't rip the vocalizer engine out of iOS or MacOS because it's unix compiled and processor specific.

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Reply by jack 2017-11-17 01:45:59

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While you could get Vocalizer 2.2 for nvda, the machine learning aspects of the female siri voice no doubt rely on external dependencies.

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Reply by braille0109 2017-11-17 12:44:58

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I wonder what would happen, if someone tried using the not so legal vocaliser 2.2 off the blindhelp web site, and see what would then happen with the IOS10 voices. putting that aside, these new siri voices are just a slightly modified version of vocaliser. the US siri female, for instance, is Zoe. if you have an android, or JAWS, you'll see what I mean. while she doesn't sound as similar on JAWS, if you get an android, you'll see what I mean.

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Reply by st.mc 2017-11-23 18:26:40

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@braille0109 If I had an IOS device I'd certainly try that.

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Reply by braille0109 2017-11-25 23:27:57

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I'm not jailbroken, else I'd try. if someone wants to send me the data, I'm also willing to try.

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Reply by Brynify 2017-11-27 04:08:27

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A bit of info.

The new SIRI female voice is called Nora. The male one is still called Aaron, as before.

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Reply by Slender 2017-11-27 07:01:39

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I bele

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Reply by Slender 2017-11-27 07:10:10

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I believe the new FEMALE WAS MADE BY Apple itself, and was likely not licensed from another company as it was before, which may mean it doesn't use the Vocalizer driver. Extracting the voices from a Mac would probably not be possible either, since Mac OS uses a completely different file structure for its voices than Windows. As far as I know, they're all contained in a single file CALLED PCMWave, with another file called voice description that provides the sample text and other properties. However we will have to see how it works when iOS 11 is jailbroken, if that ever happens. LOL.

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Reply by musicalman 2017-11-27 11:18:01

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Probably a stupid thought, so someone please inform me how stupid this is, but I just had an idea.
As an experiment last year, I tried to download an old IOS ispw, and extract its contents to get the Voiceover and IOS sounds out of it. I had to use a Mac VM to extract it, but I got about 2 GB of stuff out IIRC. I wonder if downloading an IOS 11 ispw would yield similar results so waiting for a jailbreak wouldn't be as necessary?
If or when a jailbreak does happen for IOS 11 I will not be subscribing to it because I have no desire to jailbreak my device. So I don't know what jailbreaks do. What precisely would we need a jailbreak for to make this work?

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Reply by G-Rad 2017-11-28 06:31:35

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Blind Help vocalizer voices don't seem to have the siri voices, unless they have different names, but they all sound diferent.  Samantha and Ava sound like they are too close to the mic, Zoe sounds too far away, Tom solunds creepy, Nathan sounds  too... Iunno,  raspy?   Allison sounds glitched.   I would like to get the Siri voices but they're not vailable

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Reply by braille0109 2017-11-30 01:59:04

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given that I'm on a public beta, jailbreaking won't happen. putting that aside, how does one extract the IPSW contents? I managed to extract the main file with 7zip, but after that, I was completely stuck on how to extract the DMG.

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Reply by Chris 2017-11-30 02:39:51

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I'm pretty sure the full quality voice isn't found inside the IPSW file. The operating system downloads the necessary files from a server.
Have you tried extracting the dmg disk image with 7Zip? I'm not aware of any other tools on Windows that can access these. If you're using a Mac, just open the dmg file and it will mount the disk image.

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Reply by musicalman 2017-11-30 14:49:53

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Oh god I am stupid, Chris is right. They wouldn't be in the ipsw at all.
About DMG files: 7zip can extract some, but apparently there is a certain format of dmg that it cannot handle. There are other dmg extractors on Windows, but the ones I tried aren't very accessible, and some are paid. I do remember not having any success and having to use a Mac VM, which worked. And I also read that the only way to really extract the contents of an ispw is on a Mac, so I guess I wasn't the first to try it on Windows.

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Reply by braille0109 2017-12-02 19:23:22

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I thought the same, that the high quality voices wouldn't be in the DMG's, but curious minds just love to extract things. I tried 7zip with a DMG, but it was ugly. I can't remember the issue, but I know it failed. I can try again and report back, but I'd be rather curious about the MAC VM. do I just hit enter on the DMG, and the MAC will automatically extract it?

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Reply by musicalman 2017-12-02 20:55:36

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I remember it being easy. I think I had to mount the dmg and copy the files from it, but I'm not really sure. I didn't and still don't know how to use Mac at all so it was kinda painful. But barring my unfamiliarity with the OS, it wasn't hard to do.

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Reply by Chris 2017-12-03 04:38:37

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Pressing enter on a file in macOS presents you with an edit box to rename the item. You must press command o or command with down arrow to open a file. In the case of a dmg, it will become an available disk on the desktop if you have the Finder configured to show external disks on the desktop. If not, press command shift c to open the computer window and locate the mounted disk image in that list.

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Reply by G-Rad 2017-12-05 12:33:25

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Only thing I could think of to put in with this is the Siri voice that is used for general Siri should be  available within the context of the  image?  Wouldn't it make sense to have something like that so that way it's available on the device if you're installing and don't want to have net acess to the system?

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Reply by braille0109 2017-12-05 13:43:23

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really, I haven't tried mountaing, only extracting with 7zip. if all that fails, out comes the Mac. Unfortunately, as jailbreaking currently stands, I doubt we will have access to the real voice data any time soon. the last proper jailbreak we had was back in 9.x, after all.

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Reply by G-Rad 2018-09-28 14:26:54

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I wonder if anyone has done anything with this?   I'd love to figure out a way to use the siri voices, or at least Nikki's voice on NVDA.  I like the way these voices sound in comparioson  sometimes.  I currently use Microsoft David at default  tone and if I use Zira, I'd put her voice down to  pitch level of 30.    Back in the older days of WIndows 10, I used WIndows  Eva, which was a revision of Cortana's voice, but with the fall creators update, the voice went amuck, so I couldn't use it anymore,   which was a great voice.

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