My answer to this repetitive question is most definitely no and for the
same reason speech synthesizers weren't originally given naturally
sounding voices in the beginning of their development. Speech
synthesizers in the early 1960's were top secret equipment and put in
military fighter aircraft and maybe also bombers. The reason they didn't
get natural sounding voices then was that the air crews needed to be able
to distinguish speech synthesizer announcements from other natural
sounding speech from over the intercom and over the radio. Having lived
with synthetic sounding speech in my case since 1987 not only am I used to
it, as a result of research I did on its origins I understand its purpose
and proper use. Can synthetic speech be left synthetic and get around
people's auditory difficulties? That I don't know but that could be a
helpful line of research.
On Sun, 18 Apr 2021, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
But this is one thing I find confusing...at least for Linux.
tts is not a screen reader program.
One may incorporate a tts module into the workings of a screen reader
program, the way drivers were written to allow hardware synthesizers to
communicate with said program, but the tts itself is not going to, on its
own, manage things like responsiveness while typing and the like...and that
is before you talk of latency problem possibilities.
It is the screen reader program itself that, in my experience, takes care of
inflection, allowing the user to get more or less, same thing with
punctuation marks, pitch and speed.
If speak reader is strictly a tts, the company may not understand the need
for things like making sure the tts can follow activity and control of the
computer itself.
before writing this email I did a quick google using the phrase tts
defined?
with the first several options discussing how those with reading challenges
like dyslexia use tts to manage small blocks of words on the screen with the
recommended rate of 180 words per minute..or less.
It is, speaking personally, very unfortunate that some think a tts is a
screen reader program, when in reality they are different.
I have a friend who likes to use her amazon kindle to read fanfiction aloud.
We have these discussions because my screen reader has no issue properly
pronouncing say the name of Ron Weasley from the harry Potter books, but the
Kindle tts cannot pronounce the word correctly at all.
Do not be surprised if you end up needing to demonstrate how your screen
reader, orca or speakup, does more than just read text, which for many is
the only purpose of a tts tool.
Does that make sense?
On Sat, 17 Apr 2021, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
The problem is that all the so called human voices are spliced together
syllables and word fragments taped together. So you get emphasis on the
wrong parts of the sentences, pauses in the wrong place, and stuff like
that. If they would devote more machine learning time into proper text to
speech rendering instead of sensorship and other nonsense, we might get
somewhere.
----- Original Message -----
From: Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:42:25 +0000
Subject: Re: Formatting - was Would you be interested in having natural
sounding TTS voices by Readspeaker on Linux? demo link included
Don't get me wrong, more natural sounding TTS with proper inflection
would be great, and for me, the holy grail would be TTS capable of
reading a digitized novel in real-time or reading subtitles on foreign
media in real-time and be indistinguishable from a human cast
recording a audio dramatization or dubbed vocal track... but unless
there's been massive improvements in recent years I'm unaware of, the
natural voices are at that point where they almost sound human but
fail in a subtle but unsettling way that's hard to qualify, and until
we get over that hurdle, I'll take the obviously robotic monotone over
the almost, but not quite, passes for a human reader voices for daily
work.
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