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If this goes through, Microsoft could do something positive with some tech that Nuance owns that probably isn't making much money anymore anyway. One of the tex
by mwcampbell 6y ago
If this goes through, Microsoft could do something positive with some tech that Nuance owns that probably isn't making much money anymore anyway. One of the text-to-speech (speech synthesis) engines that Nuance got from its various acquisitions is called ETI-Eloquence. It does pure speech synthesis, not concatenation of pre-recorded human speech like most modern TTS engines. So it's particularly popular among blind power-users because it can speak very fast while still being quite intelligible. At the same time, it doesn't hold much if any appeal for mainstream applications. But the codebase has been abandoned for a while. So it would be awesome if Microsoft would open-source ETI-Eloquence. Hey, I can dream.
- bramd 6y agoMy thought exactly. An open source version could be nice in it's own right or lead to good improvements on other open source speech synthesizers such as Espeak. I think current TTS research/software is only focused on sounding nice and human. This is cool if you want to replace a human voice with something computer generated, but not ideal if you want an efficient speech output that can convey as much info as possible as fast as possible. Predictability is key here, I could proofread a text in Dutch (my native language) with ETI Eloquence set to English and just by the sound of certain letter combinations I would know if there is a spelling mistake, couldn't do that with any other "better sounding" synth.