Just a friendly reminder, as stated in the readme.txt, you can use
Window-Eyes tones A through S (I being the default) to adjust each voice
with different variants for eSpeak.
Doug
On 12/11/2013 11:05 AM, Rob Hudson wrote:
You are of course correct about all of your points, but it doesn't do
any good if you can't understand what it pronounces. The head size on
this synth is minimal, so it sounds like he's talking with his nose
pinched shut. There's hardly any resonance, so the voice is pretty
much in the higher frequencies, which is right where my hearing loss
is the greatest. If you stick your fingers between your lips and then
try to talk fast, that's what the espeak synth sounds like to me. It
is an 80s throwback.
Now having said all that, I don't think any of this could be fixed and
still have espeak keep a small footprint. This is why I haven't taken
my complaints to the espeak developer. That, and I have heard from
others that he doesn't much care what users think; it's a free synth,
deal with it, seems to be what the developer thinks. I have not
confirmed this for myself however.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Christo de Klerk"
<[email protected]>
To: "Rob Hudson" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 9:09 AM
Subject: Re: eSpeak
Hello all
Let us just get some perspective here. While it is true that the
eSpeak voice certainly does not sound nice, but sounds electronic and
rasping, people are probably not aware that it can make use of the
MBrola voices which are human recorded voices. I have now for years
been using eSpeak as a SAPI 5 synth with Window-Eyes with the UK
English MBrola voice which is probably the most human sounding voice
I have ever heard.
Then there are a lot of other advantages to eSpeak. First, it is very
responsive, probably because its footprint is so small. Its download
is less than 1.5 MB in size and that even includes all the languages
it supports. Then, talking about languages, it probably supports more
languages than any other synthesiser I have played with. It is the
only synthesiser that supports my first language, Afrikaans. Because
it is open source, I have been able to work on the Afrikaans voice
and improved it to about 99% accuracy. Of all synthesisers I have
experienced, eSpeak mispronounces the fewest words in English. Its
accuracy by far exceeds that of even Vocalizer. If you are interested
in linguistics, it will be very difficult to do without eSpeak,
because it is the only synthesiser which pronounces all Greek
letters, the International Phonetic Alphabet and many, many other
unicode characters which are mostly ignored by other synths.
Believe me, you get a hell of a lot more than the nothing you pay for
it.
Kind regards
Christo
On 2013/12/11 04:52 PM, Rob Hudson wrote:
You get what you pay for. Laugh.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Russ Kiehne" <[email protected]>
To: "Don H" <[email protected]>; "gwmicro" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 8:15 AM
Subject: Re: eSpeak
I was wondering the same thing! It's one of the poorest
synthesizers I've heard.
-----Original Message----- From: Don H
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 9:23 AM
To: gwmicro
Subject: eSpeak
Have to wonder why GW went to the trouble to add such poor sounding
speech syn as this eSpeak.
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