Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator

Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by audiometry on Sunday January 03, 2021 @06:19AM (#25621131)

Text to speech.... several years ago I was playing with a pet project to make procedurally generated number station broadcasts. For that I needed text 2 speech with ?euphony? The available tools were horrid. There was some library MaryTTS (?) that had a poor python wrapper to talk to it. All the web based systems were super stingy in their demo resources and their use cases seemed geared more for TTS phrases that you’d have on a phone menu or something, not a paragraph of prose. I used Watson’s tool for a while before they became very annoying and I abandoned it.

Is there any better TTS Tool people could recommend?

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Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by nmfisher on Sunday January 03, 2021 @08:11AM (#25621569)

I use Azure neural TTS for (Chinese) voice synthesis in my app, and honestly it's amazing.

I did experiment with Google's API at the beginning, the audio would contain recurring artefacts that made it painfully obvious it wasn't real. If I had to describe it, I'd say "50ms of the sound your computer makes when it hangs while playing an audio file".

No such problems with Azure. Zero artefacts and nice, crisp, natural enunciation, though unfortunately it is still quite unreliable when synthesizing single words (as compared with full sentences). You can actually test it out by using the "Read Aloud" feature inside Edge.

I don't know how well this translates to English, though. I definitely enjoy the benefit of working with a gender/language combination (female/Chinese) that's received the largest total investment of effort and resources. Many well-resourced Chinese companies (banks, tech services, gaming, etc) all use similar synthesized female voices in their phone/online/B&M services.

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Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by shakna on Sunday January 03, 2021 @07:39AM (#25621427)

Amazon Polly [0] and Google's Neural Voices [1] make Watson's voice seem pretty awful by comparison. Unfortunately, they can be costly, depending on what you're doing, and you have to hope neither of those companies cut off your access for arbitrary reasons.

If/when that happens, and you go to look at the rest of the tools... They're pretty crap. Still.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

[1] https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/

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Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by nshm on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:56PM (#25623451)

For open source offline TTS with more or less recent algorithms you can check

https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorFlowTTS

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Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by criddell on Sunday January 03, 2021 @08:46AM (#25621714)

If your software works on a Mac, maybe the built-in TTS functionality would work.

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Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by kalico on Sunday January 03, 2021 @09:07AM (#25621820)

I've been working on a TTS API connector and SSML editor. Voxabot.com Take note that unfortunately the Neutral TTS for Polly isn't fully exposed. That’s arguably the best sounding TTS.

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Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by tpoacher on Monday January 04, 2021 @09:40AM (#25631861)

I can't access the demo. It says "Sign in with Google".

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Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by audiometry on Sunday January 03, 2021 @08:52AM (#25621754)

The term I meant to use above was 'prosody' not euphony.

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Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator by billfruit on Sunday January 03, 2021 @09:17AM (#25621883)

What does emacspeak use for example?

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