Text to Speech software

[Grizzlly]

Wednesday, July 03, 2024  at 20:33, Robert Heller wrote:
Re: Text to Speech software (at least in part)

>> Hi
 
>> Looking for good  "Text to Speech" software, would like something that does not 
>> sound like Stephen Hawkins trying decide on lunch choices but is not too hard 
>> to install and setup, a search around the net found ESpeakm all others I found 
>> seemn to be aimed at software devs to combine in other projects, and need very 
>> high coding levels to use (so really a /w dev)
 
>> I don't mind if it's CmdLine or GUI, but it should sound natural(ish) Enflish 
>> is fine so multi-language support is not that important, a few voices would be 
>> nice, but a good male & female will do at a push

>The problem with "cheap" "Text to Speech" software is that it is phoneme based. 
>And there are two problems: English spelling is horrible from a phoneme point 
>of view: many English words are NOT spelled to match spoken English. The 
>second problem is that with "natural" spoken English, some words are spoken 
>differently (actually different phonemes) depending on context. So you have to 
>do things: convert the text to a sequence of phonemes, but not just a 
>word-by-word lookup and replace, but analysing whole sentences.

>The "Stephen Hawkins" (aka "Speak And Spell") style of "Text to Speech"
>systems either do a direct latin alphabet word intellegable speech, it does
>sound "strange" and "unnatural" (clasic 1950s SciFi movie evil robot). 

>Note: most of the speech oriented assistant systems are NOT generally using
>true "Text to Speech", but are mostly using recorded voice. This is generally
>also true for phone answering systems. For some things words (like digits,
>letters, months, state names, etc), but often whole phrases.  I supose some AI 
>systems might be doing "intellegent" phoneme generation and maybe might be 
>"modulating" the phonemes to produce "natural" human voice (as opposed to 
>gender netural "Stephen Hawkins" / "Speak And Spell" phonemes).

Many thanks, 

I hoped TTS had come a long way since "MS Sue" which seems to have not changed 
since Win95

Tho old owner of my MacBookPro had a rather nice TTS (Apples default IIRC) that 
he played "text" files (ePub, Pdf etc) it sounded almost as good as most of my 
own mp3 audio books