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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