FWIW, was playing around with/trying out the one acapella TTS engine
voice - English UK, Graham, but, there are two issues have come across
with this voice engine that will never have me recommend it to anyone.
Firstly, this was installed on my samsung galaxy S5 phone, currently
running marshmallow 6.0, and, while it has a decent-sized SDCard
inserted, it's set to use internal memory for most things, but, that's
not really relevant.
First thing is installed the TTS engine, which is free, but which then
offers in-app purchases for the voices themselves.
I then paid for the English UK, Graham voice, after listening to various
voice samples.
The issue started when I had restarted phone a couple of times, and,
talkback just stopped speaking after one of those reboots.
I used a form of trick/workaround to get phone functional again -
powered phone off, and, took out sim card so that wouldn't then need to
enter pin code on startup, and could then invoke talkback global context
menu, and, then activate TTS settings from there - that's another reason
I stick to the explore by touch layout for the context menu's, since
otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to find the TTS settings menu item
if it had brought up the list version.
Anyway, that meant I could then set it back to using google TTS
temporarily since the top two entries in the list of available engines
always seem to stick to being Samsung TTS and google TTS even if the
other alternatives seem to shuffle their order around at times.
When then contacted acapella support via the voice manager app the
engine installs on your phone, which initiates sending them an e-mail
with logs, etc. attached, they told me that it was probably looking for
voice data on the SDCard, even though it had installed it on the phone's
internal memory, so I copied it over to the SDCard, and, thought would
play around with it a bit more, even though didn't try setting it as my
primary TTS engine again - just wanted to see if the voiceData folder
stayed available on the SDCard, and, it seemed to work alright for a
while, and, this was since in their reply to support mail, they'd
mentioned that they thought that some file cleanup utilities might wipe
out the folder on the SDCard at times - wasn't sure about that one
either, but anyway.
However, when figured out how to add a pronunciation entry for my
surname to the voice data, that's when I finally got to the point where
I will definitely not be recommending this voice engine to anyone.
What happened is I figured out that while the documentation refers to
the dictionary editor, the button just labelled editor under voice
manager is the one that brings up the dictionary entry editor window.
But, I added an entry for my surname, kruger, and, ther replacement was
just kroo gger, which was then pronounced right when I explored the
screen to the edit box, just to make sure.
Issue is when I then double-tapped on the save button to add the entry
to the dictionary, the voice just bombed out, and stopped speaking all
over again.
I managed to, again, reset the primary TTS engine to google TTS, using
the method mentioned above, but, honestly, this is just a pretty much
unacceptable implementation of a TTS engine when it comes to those of us
who require spoken output to work with our phones.
So, yes, might still consider using this voice for things like eBook
reading, but, it will _never_ be my choice for primary TTS output, and,
I am definitely not going to recommend it to anyone as a choice of voice
engine.
funnily enough, there are some people on the eyes-free android mailing
list who have been using it as their primary engines for quite a while,
but, that also just suggests to me that acapella didn't do decent
testing, etc., so while it may be stable on some combinations of
hardware, etc., it has issues when it comes to some other combinations.
And, yes, have notified acapella about this as well, but, that's just
since I know I should.
Stay well (away from acapella TTS)
Jacob Kruger
Blind Biker
Skype: BlindZA
"Resistance is futile, but, acceptance is versatile..."
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