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A comment on Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice. Parent comment

Re:Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice by ethin on Thursday January 15, 2026 @08:39PM (#46641969)
Uh, no? This is not at all an absurd requirement? Screen readers literally do this all the time, with voices that are the classic way of making a speech synthesizer, no AI required. ESpeak is an example, or MS OneCore. The NVDA screen reader has an option for automatic language switching as does pretty much every other modern screen reader in existence. And absolutely none of these use AI models to do that switching, either.
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Re:Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice by kube-system on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:05AM (#46643165)
They didn’t say it was a crazy requirement. They said it was crazy to consider it useless without meeting that requirement.
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Re:Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice by ethin on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:48AM (#46643376)
That doesn't really change what I said though. It isn't crazy to call it useless without some form of ALS either. Given that old school synthesis has been able to do it for like 20 years or so.
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Re:Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice by echoangle on Friday January 16, 2026 @04:47AM (#46644774)
How does state of the art matter when talking about usefulness? Is old school synthesis useless?
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Re:Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice by ethin on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:39PM (#46649233)
No? But is it not unreasonable to expect "state of the art" TTS to be able to do at least what old school synthesis is capable of doing? Being "state of the art" means being the highest level of development or achievement in a particular field, device, procedure, or technique at a specific point in time. I don't think it's therefore unreasonable to expect supposed "state of the art" text-to-speech synthesis to do far better at everything old-school TTS could do and then some.
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Re:Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice by kube-system on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:00PM (#46649549)
> Being "state of the art" means being the highest level of development or achievement in a particular field, device, procedure, or technique at a specific point in time. I don't think it's therefore unreasonable to expect supposed "state of the art" text-to-speech synthesis to do far better at everything old-school TTS could do and then some.

Non sequitur. Unless the 'art' in question is the 'art of adding features', usually this phrase is to describe the quality of a very specific development, these are often not even feature complete products.

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