RE: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
- From: "Harmony Neil" <harmonylm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:51:34 -0000
I find it annoying when all punctuation is on because it does slow things
down a bit, so set mine to most. It does seem weird with no punctuation
though.
-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of qubit
Sent: 10 November 2010 16:28
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
lol -- good going Sina --
I listened to Sina's computer during a skype call last week. Indeed it is
fast -- but he also turns off all punctuation. I could make out a good
portion of the words, but it might take me a little practice to bump up my
listening speed.
Question, are words-per-minute calculated differently when punctuation is
on? It does significantly slow down the overall speed.
--le
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Cox" <waywardgeek@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2010 8:20 PM
Subject: Re: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
Wow, that's great! I've been hacking both espeak and
speech-dispatcher to try and integrate it, but it's taking me longer
than I'd thought it would. Did you integrate directly into espeak, or
some other part of the emacspeak sound stack?
As for NVDA, when Alex or I finish integration with espeak, it will
hopefully only be a matter of time before it shows up in NVDA.
As for speeding up certain vowels vs certain consonants, sonic doesn't
do any of that. In fact, one of the reasons I prefer espeak with
sonic speed up is that espeak does try to play with ratios of silence
and some sounds as you go faster, and it makes espeak sound worse,
IMO. If you train to understand a synth at high speed, your ear will
eventually correct for the problems that we all hear initially in high
speed speech.
The best example is Eloquence. I have long wondered what magical
algorithms they used to make it sound so good at high speed. The
answer is... nothing! When I speed up normal speed Eloquence, it
sounds almost identical to what Eloquence generates directly at high
speed. This shows that Eloquence is not fine tuning speech as it
plays faster... it simply plays faster! Actually, they probably did
tune it a lot to work well at high speed, but all that tuning applies
to speech at all rates.
So, if you've ever wondered who the fastest speed listener in the
world is, I can tell you. It's Sina, at least for now. I know that
because even Eloquence has a fastest rate - 100%. We've sped up some
Eloquence samples generated at default speed, and Sina can comprehend
them well past the 100% speed.
Bill
On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Alex Midence <alex.midencu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> He succeeded wonderfully. Even got emacspeak with espeak to work
> without chopping off the ends of syllables in links and line endings.
> Also can navigate by char now. In orca and speak-up, espeak now
> sounds fluid when sped up to about 300 words per minute. As for the
> clarity of it or the asthetics of the voice, it is still espeak. It
> doesn't sound as nice as eloquence or dectalk or anything like that
> but, it's free and its fast and it works just fine. Nice work, Bill.
>
> Alex M
>
> On 11/9/10, Ken Perry <whistler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I think Bill is applying this library to the speech dispatcher so that
>> should take care of making speeding up espeak sound better.
>>
>> Ken
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Homme, James
>> Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2010 7:01 AM
>> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: RE: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
>>
>> Hi,
>> It would be wonderful if someone would have a look at Espeak. I don't
>> know
>> C, so I can't help with that project.
>>
>> Jim
>>
>> Jim Homme,
>> Usability Services,
>> Phone: 412-544-1810. Skype: jim.homme
>> Internal recipients, Read my accessibility blog. Discuss accessibility
>> here. Accessibility Wiki: Breaking news and accessibility advice
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill Cox
>> Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 7:40 PM
>> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: Re: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
>>
>> Hi, Stefik. There aren't any tutorials yet. The project is too new.
>> I'm currently hacking it into speech-dispatcher to enable Linux users
>> to enjoy it.
>>
>> I do believe it will be useful in a lot of places. Mainly, I was
>> worried that excellent TTS systems like Eloquence are slowly going
>> away, leaving people with vision impairments with only slow natural
>> speech TTS systems. Now I feel that problem is solved, as we can
>> speed up any natural TTS system and I think achieve very high
>> listening rates. I've been testing my friends and family (they think
>> I'm weird, but that's nothing new). My family can listen from 2.5X to
>> 3X faster than recorded without training, and my old school friend can
>> listen at 3.5X speed up. I can listen at about 4X, but I've been
>> training to speed-listen for over a year. All of us can listen to
>> real voices at faster rates than we can alisten to Eloquence. This
>> leads me to be hopeful about the future of TTS.
>>
>> Bill
>>> Any tutorials available for how you would use it with various existing
>>> speech architectures? This sounds like a useful project.
>>>
>>> Stefik
>>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>>>> On 11/4/10, Bill Cox <waywardgeek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>> I've release a new very simple library for speeding up or slowing down
>>>>> speech. It's primary strength is high quality at greater than 2X
>>>>> speed up. The code can be checked out with:
>>>>>
>>>>> $ git clone git://vinux-project.org/sonic
>>>>>
>>>>> There are speech samples in the samples directory. The primary
>>>>> motivation for this library is to enable low speed speech synthesizers
>>>>> to play at high speed with high quality. My hope is that many will be
>>>>> as easy to comprehend as Eloquence, giving us a lot more options in
>>>>> high speed TTS.
>>>>>
>>>>> Bill
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