2018-02-11 03:09:01

This might be a silly idea. But if someone could compile Espeak to works with VoiceOver on the Mac, would be awesome.

2018-02-11 03:16:15

@75 this sound is across 4 different machines though. My old i7 desktop I don't have anymore, my lenovo laptop which bit the dust, a borrowed laptop while I was getting up the money to buy a new one, and this one that I have currently.

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2018-02-11 03:24:50

Ever since switching to a Mac, any Windows speech synthesizer sounds so dull now. I'll tell you why, too. MacinTalk focuses on a whole paragraph of text, and actually takes advantage of that. Windows screen readers only deal with clauses, usually. Even the great open source eSpeak doesn't really have the ability to process what we throw at it. It just looks at parts of speech in a phrase, whereas Apple looks at word usage within a whole paragraph. Is it perfect? No. But Alex, and Fred for those who like the flow of formant speech, are paragraphs ahead of Eloquence.

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2018-02-11 04:49:05

Don't want to look back either. But just wanted to see how fast is and responsive of Espeak on Mac.

2018-02-11 09:48:44

Considering just how terrible espeak is on windows with NVDA, I don't even want to think about it being ported to mac. Its abcilutely crap.

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2018-02-11 14:41:57

Crap or not, your great Apple will never support as many languages as Espeak, so for some of us it is not even an option to use them.

2018-02-11 16:44:19

And Espeak, whether you like it or not, isn't as crappy as one makes it out to be. It can do great at fast speeds. Natural voices always end up slurring their speech as the speed gets faster. They're getting better at avoiding this, but a lot of them still do. As for espeak with voiceover? Someone did it, but not sure where it went.

2018-02-12 03:12:54

That rate boost thing is only some sort of wave reshaper though, it doesn't make it speak any faster, and if you go much about 15 with it on, you start to hear weird artifacts. It's really a subjective thing, I for one don't like the metallic, robotic, harsh sound it produces, while others just see a synth that does reasonably well at fast speeds.

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2018-02-14 19:22:55

Um, of course it does make it speak faster, it is just a matter of whether you will get used to it.

2018-02-14 19:33:16

It uses this library to do it, its called Sonic. essentially speeding up the output. So ,yes, it is as I say, and why not do a little research so you know what you're talking about and don't look like a fool.

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2018-02-14 22:32:58

So before calling me a fool, I didn't really see where does it prove that it does not speak faster as you said. Let's place a quote from the library you linked to yourself:
Sonic is a simple algorithm for speeding up or slowing down speech.  However,
it's optimized for speed ups of over 2X, unlike previous algorithms for changing
speech rate.  The Sonic library is a very simple ANSI C library that is designed
to easily be integrated into streaming voice applications, like TTS back ends.
So I don't really see what you are talking about here, but if speeding up the output means that the TTS will not speak faster, ok then.

2018-02-15 00:21:56

its speaking faster but that library is boosting it, its not like eSpeak is doing it by itself, yeah looking back on that post I realize it could have been worded a little more clearly.

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2018-02-15 00:49:13

Oh you mean that Espeak uses the library, well yeah of course it does. There is even an eloquence NVDA addon with rate boost support. When people talk about fast rates though, they don't mean just the rate boost option but the rate in general.

2018-02-15 01:42:12

yeah I know, but I was just saying it doesn't sound good above a certain threshold. Also, sorry about the fool remark, I was annoyed about something else earlier when I posted that, incidentally, I thought I removed it before I hit post, but I must have not hit delete or something.

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2018-02-15 04:34:08

No problem. I agree with you there about it sounding bad, but I know there are people who use it at extremely high rates.

2018-02-15 06:14:17

Yeah, the point I was trying to make is that eSpeak itself will only speak so fast, and then it needs to kick over to Sonic, which artificially boosts it. In NVDA, that's triggered by the user hitting the rate boost checkbox. It sounds good up to a point, but if you take it too far, it gets a weird raspiness or roughness in the voice.

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2018-02-22 14:44:59

The thing is...
There are many of us who like eloquence. Then there are the ones who hate it, and that's ok.
But I think that if they do it like on android, an app that will be paid, they will get some profit. I personally looked at the iPhone voices and I hate them. I use the reed voice, the Italian one on eloquence and hate all other existent voices. I am not good at writing petitions, but if someone knows how to make their words bond together and flow so it would sound good, I would sign it. And I know others who would do the same. Some of my friends are on android only because eloquence isn't on iPhones.

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