RE: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
- From: "Homme, James" <james.homme@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 12:13:11 -0500
Hi Alex,
Two things. First, I hate the pauses Eloquence inserts with it changes voices.
Second, this is why I made the sound scheme that I use in JAWS which plays
sounds for various controls.
Thanks.
Jim
Jim Homme,
Usability Services,
Phone: 412-544-1810. Skype: jim.homme
Internal recipients, Read my accessibility blog. Discuss accessibility here.
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-----Original Message-----
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alex Midence
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 11:56 AM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: New speech speed-up library available under GPL
Hi, Laura,
Espeak does not sound anything like what most people would consider
real. It's about as robotic as it gets. Eloquence is far superior to
it in clarity but espeak is open source and works with just about any
screen reading solution in linux. Speak-up and Yassr (console/command
line screen readers), Orca (gnome gui xwindows reader), and emacspeak
(an audible ui wrapped around emacs), all work with it so you can use
the same synth for all apps. I'm with you on the subject of
real-sounding voices. They're great for when you have time to slowly
make your way through a document but, when you want to go fast, you
need something that doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. You
want shameless artificiality at breakneck speeds. I like eloquence
but, if I had my druthers, I'd use dectalk/fonix for everything.
On the subject of increased speed, a solution I adopt is to use
different voices for different things. I use the rent-a-crowd option
in Jaws for the web so I can zoom through websites without having to
hear heading level what's it, links described as link, or any of that.
It makes a difference. I do the same thing in word and powerpoint
for work wher each font is read in a progressively lower voice as the
font size increases. The only time I ever have pnctuation really
turned on high is in EdSharp and code::blocks. In Linux, I have only
had it turned on in emacspeak. Where possible, I fiddle with
different voices for different things so that I don't have to waste
any time on having it tell me about certain elements. It's like
audible color-coding. I once read a page by T. V. Raman where he
claims that doing this takes much of the cognitive element out of
screen layout interpretation while reading the screen so you can focus
on the data itself and let the smae part of your brain that visual
users employ in interpreting data by color and font size, ETC. attend
to similar things with regard to layout and attributes. It was so
intriguing I went off then and there to see what I could do to modify
my screen readers accordingly. I think he's absolutely right.
Have a nice day,
Alex M
On 11/10/10, qubit <lauraeaves@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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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