[nvda] Re: SpeechHub: A new cross platform TTS server

Hello,
Can I firs say well done on the firs version I think there is a bit of work to be done but well done anyway and thanks for all your hard work thus far, 

OK down to brass tacks, first I get clicks threw my usbg headset.
I get the clicks even when I am not asking the screen reader to do anything. I don't know enough about it but suspect it has something to do with the server side of things.
I have had the clicks with open Marry, I have also tried without success to change the peico voice I can only get it to talk in the American English and it does say UK English but does not change from American English.
I use accapella voices Peter and Rachele, i hear it saying sapi5 Rachel but when I go to Peter it does say his name but does not speak in his voice, incidentally Rachel does speak OK.
I already have Pico installed in the synth driver folder of nvda could this be why Pico does not work properly?
I find the open Mary a bit sluggish at fast speed, it seems to stutter and click but I am impressed and like the plugin well done and I hope you have found this hopefully constructive criticism of some help thanks again and I really hope this can be taken further and we can get more synths added at some point with thanks. 

On 06/02/2012 19:23, Isaac Porat wrote:

Hi Brian

Thanks for testing SpeechHub one has to distinguish between the
performance of the server itself and the various voices it supports.

I suspect that the reason your firewall complains is because SH uses TCP
/ IP
It should not complain because the SH server is internal, in other
words, it does not go beyond your firewall so there is no security
issue. I use Security essentials and it does not complain.

Regarding MaryTTS, as Bill said, it is experimental and as such is not
directly related to SH which uses the voice if you wish.
Single characters are indeed an issue which we hope to work with the
developers to resolve. This does not respond well to change in pitch and
I found it better to reduce the pitch level in the NVDA configuration
box; still it is far from perfect.
On the quality side, again nothing to do with SH itself the voices
working continuously in my opinion are the most natural in open source

If you want to raise specific issue about the installation Java etc I
propose that you contact me directly at:
speakon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Regards
Isaac



On 06/02/2012 17:14, Mario Mannea wrote:

The other letters that sound the same are v as in victor and, b as in
beta.


-----Original Message-----
From: nvda-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:nvda-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Brian's Mail list account BY
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2012 9:40 AM
To: nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [nvda] Re: SpeechHub: A new cross platform TTS server

I am still using the female voice now and its missing characters all
over
the place. Its also clicking a lot as I type.
I think it needs better single letter pronouncings. M and N sound the
same
to me.

Brian

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Cox"<waywardgeek@xxxxxxxxx>
To:<nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2012 1:22 PM
Subject: [nvda] Re: SpeechHub: A new cross platform TTS server



Thanks for the quick and detailed feedback, Brian. It does sound like
SpeechHub crashed outright, as it shows up as javaw in the process
list. We tested primarily with Java 6, and some with Java 7, and only
32-bit versions. Do you know which version you have installed?

Isaac may be able to say more about the SAPI 5 driver issues. The
nasal sounding voices are the Pico female voices. It's not because
they are designed for small speakers. It's actually a very nasal
voice. I think it sounds terrible, but I can understand it at pretty
high speed, and it's available in 6 languages. I've been told that
the french voice sounds better.

The voices at the end of the list with the strange names are the ones
I'm most excited about. They are Mary TTS voices. The one I use
mostly is cmu-rms-hsmm. We've asked the Mary TTS author if he would
mind providing a nicer alias for his voices, but if that doesn't
happen, we'll add an alias capability ourselves.

The Mary TTS voices could be the ones crashing. These voices are
still somewhat experimental, and have had the least real world use
with screen readers of the lot. I intend to work with the Mary TTS
devs to help make it more stable and responsive over the long term.

Thanks,
Bill

On 2/6/12, Brian's Mail list account BY<bglists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

wrote:

Hi, well I installed it and the first problem... welll you just knew

I'd

have one didn't you?, was that windows threw a bobbly when going

through

the
voices it says JAVAW.EXE has encountered a problem. At any rate all
spoken
output stopped at this point and I had to launch my alternative copy

of

nova.
I noticed also that it cannot see my Serena voice but is happy with
Daniel
but Emily sounds terrible due no doubt to using a bespoke driver

rather

than
the microsoft sound mapper I selected in sapi 5 native in nvda.
I was also intrigued to note that This Javaw wanted me to open my
firewall
to it so wondered what all that was about?

It has, on my xp machine, a number of male voices at the bottom of

the

list
which are hard to tell what they are as they seem to say initials a

lot,

thenthe espeak ones from presumably the sapi 5 version of espeak,

Some

Orpheous ones that do not quite work properly as they say space

before

everything, then some femal voices. These are different to my normal

pio

but
do still exhibit that nasal problem due, I assume to being designed

for

small speakers.
It was while on the male ones at the bottom that the crash occured.
Hope this makes sense.
Brian

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Cox"<waywardgeek@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "nvda"<nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2012 11:55 AM
Subject: [nvda] SpeechHub: A new cross platform TTS server



We are pleased to announce SpeechHub the first cross platform TTS
server for the vision impaired community.

A TTS server receives text from talking applications such as NVDA

and

converts it to speech. SpeechHub is available as a plug-in for NVDA
which enables it to use the synthesizers supported by SpeechHub.

When

you installed SpeechHub, a number of synthesizers are installed and
the NVDA plug-in is configured automatically; simply quit NVDA and
restart it again, select SpeechHub as the synthesizer and select

the

voice you want.

At present the installation of SpeechHub supports the following
synthesizers:

- Mary TTS (known also as Open Mary), 4 English voices are

installed.

- Pico TTS 6 languages are installed
- eSpeak, all languages and most voices.
- SAPI5, major languages, synthesizers installed on your computer.

We will provide more synthesizer support and voices in a variety of
languages in future versions.

Sonic support for high speed is built in for most synthesizers.
SpeechHub is highly responsive and for reliability engines are
monitored and restarted automatically if necessary.

The installer is currently hosted on a fairly low bandwidth server,

so

your download may be fairly slow, especially if there is anyone else
downloading at the same time. You can find more information

including

instructions on download and installation here:

http://www.speechhub.org

This version is still in alpha, we have tested it extensively with
help from the community and we believe it works well. Nevertheless,
use at your own risk.

Assuming people are courteous and the moderator does not mind we

will

hang around this list and reply to questions.

Regards,
Bill Cox and Isaac Porat
SpeechHub developers
Come talk with other NVDA users on irc.blufudge.net #NVDA
Your continued donations help keep NVDA development going strong.

Donate

at:
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Or by purchasing voices from Ivona TTS:
http://www.ivona.com/accessibility.php
Use the following link with the code STOR-4NS3-DSCT to save 10% on
Voices
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Get SkypeTalking for NVDA:
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Come talk with other NVDA users on irc.blufudge.net #NVDA
Your continued donations help keep NVDA development going strong.

Donate

at:
http://www.nvaccess.org/wiki/Donate
Or by purchasing voices from Ivona TTS:
http://www.ivona.com/accessibility.php
Use the following link with the code STOR-4NS3-DSCT to save 10% on

Voices

from nextup.com:
http://bit.ly/eJN97w
To post messages to the list send email to
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To modify your NVDA Email settings or view archives go to:
http://www.freelists.org/list/nvda
NVDA homepage:
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NVDA on Facebook:
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The NVDA controler DLL is at:
http://www.nvda-project.org/nvdaControllerClient/
NVDA Snapshot Downloader:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1473937/NVDASD-v2.0.2.exe
Get SkypeTalking for NVDA:
http://skypetalking.googlecode.com/


Come talk with other NVDA users on irc.blufudge.net #NVDA
Your continued donations help keep NVDA development going strong.

Donate

at:
http://www.nvaccess.org/wiki/Donate
Or by purchasing voices from Ivona TTS:
http://www.ivona.com/accessibility.php
Use the following link with the code STOR-4NS3-DSCT to save 10% on

Voices

from nextup.com:
http://bit.ly/eJN97w
To post messages to the list send email to
nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To modify your NVDA Email settings or view archives go to:
http://www.freelists.org/list/nvda
NVDA homepage:
http://www.nvda-project.org/
NVDA on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8601265515
The NVDA controler DLL is at:
http://www.nvda-project.org/nvdaControllerClient/
NVDA Snapshot Downloader:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1473937/NVDASD-v2.0.2.exe
Get SkypeTalking for NVDA:
http://skypetalking.googlecode.com/

Come talk with other NVDA users on irc.blufudge.net #NVDA
Your continued donations help keep NVDA development going strong. Donate
at:
http://www.nvaccess.org/wiki/Donate
Or by purchasing voices from Ivona TTS:
http://www.ivona.com/accessibility.php
Use the following link with the code STOR-4NS3-DSCT to save 10% on
Voices from nextup.com:
http://bit.ly/eJN97w
To post messages to the list send email to
nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To modify your NVDA Email settings or view archives go to:
http://www.freelists.org/list/nvda
NVDA homepage:
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NVDA on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8601265515
The NVDA controler DLL is at:
http://www.nvda-project.org/nvdaControllerClient/
NVDA Snapshot Downloader:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1473937/NVDASD-v2.0.2.exe
Get SkypeTalking for NVDA:
http://skypetalking.googlecode.com/

Come talk with other NVDA users on irc.blufudge.net #NVDA
Your continued donations help keep NVDA development going strong.
Donate at:
http://www.nvaccess.org/wiki/Donate
Or by purchasing voices from Ivona TTS:
http://www.ivona.com/accessibility.php
Use the following link with the code STOR-4NS3-DSCT to save 10% on
Voices from nextup.com:
http://bit.ly/eJN97w
To post messages to the list send email to
nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To modify your NVDA Email settings or view archives go to:
http://www.freelists.org/list/nvda
NVDA homepage:
http://www.nvda-project.org/
NVDA on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8601265515
The NVDA controler DLL is at:
http://www.nvda-project.org/nvdaControllerClient/
NVDA Snapshot Downloader:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1473937/NVDASD-v2.0.2.exe
Get SkypeTalking for NVDA:
http://skypetalking.googlecode.com/



Come talk with other NVDA users on irc.blufudge.net #NVDA
Your continued donations help keep NVDA development going strong. Donate
at:
http://www.nvaccess.org/wiki/Donate
Or by purchasing voices from Ivona TTS:
http://www.ivona.com/accessibility.php
Use the following link with the code STOR-4NS3-DSCT to save 10% on
Voices from nextup.com:
http://bit.ly/eJN97w
To post messages to the list send email to
nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To modify your NVDA Email settings or view archives go to:
http://www.freelists.org/list/nvda
NVDA homepage:
http://www.nvda-project.org/
NVDA on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8601265515
The NVDA controler DLL is at:
http://www.nvda-project.org/nvdaControllerClient/
NVDA Snapshot Downloader:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1473937/NVDASD-v2.0.2.exe
Get SkypeTalking for NVDA:
http://skypetalking.googlecode.com/


--
All The Best
Kevin Cussick
Come talk with other NVDA users on irc.blufudge.net #NVDA
Your continued donations help keep NVDA development going strong. Donate at:
http://www.nvaccess.org/wiki/Donate
Or by purchasing voices from Ivona TTS:
http://www.ivona.com/accessibility.php
Use the following link with the code STOR-4NS3-DSCT to save 10% on Voices from 
nextup.com:
http://bit.ly/eJN97w
To post messages to the list send email to
nvda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To modify your NVDA Email settings or view archives go to:
http://www.freelists.org/list/nvda
NVDA homepage:
http://www.nvda-project.org/
NVDA on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8601265515
The NVDA controler DLL is at:
http://www.nvda-project.org/nvdaControllerClient/
NVDA Snapshot Downloader:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1473937/NVDASD-v2.0.2.exe
Get SkypeTalking for NVDA:
http://skypetalking.googlecode.com/

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