Formatting - was Would you be interested in having natural sounding TTS voices by Readspeaker on Linux? demo link included

[Linux for blind general discussion]

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 at redhat.com>
>>  To: blinux-list at redhat.com
>>  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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>>> 
>> 
>>
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