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The current state of open source )or even freeware) speech synthesis is pretty sad, to be honest. You have eSpeak, which is GPL V3, so including it in your own

The current state of open source )or even freeware) speech synthesis is pretty sad, to be honest. You have eSpeak, which is GPL V3, so including it in your own software is a problem. RH Voice can be compiled without GPL code, but its language support is pretty limited. There's also SAM, which is incredibly easy to port and incredibly light on resources, but its licensing status is unknown, it's English only and it just sounds bad, even to somebody used to robotic synths. If you're developing for a popular platform, it probably has something built-in, but if you're developing for embedded, you need to pay thousands of dollars to Cerrence (formerly Nuance) to even get started.

mwcampbell 5y ago
Do you happen to know if ETI-Eloquence is now owned by Cerence, or if Microsoft got it with the Nuance acquisition? I'm afraid I was a little too eager to suggest that Microsoft open-source Eloquence when the news of the Nuance acquisition first came out.
- miki123211 5y ago
  Vocalizer is definitely Cerence, that I'm sure of. All the automotive stuff, which Vocalizer is a part of, was spun off before the acquisition. As an aside, because of Vocalizer's use in automotive, it will probably be the only high-ish quality speech engine that won't become fully cloud-based. VFO's claims about the continued use of Vocalizer in JAWS seem to confirm that. Regarding Eloquence itself, its status is not really known. I would be extremely surprised if it was owned by Microsoft, though. There's a hypothesis that nobody really knows who actually owns it, there were multiple companies that assisted in its development, including IBM. The product was so unimportant to Nuance these days that they might not even have considered it when doing the spinoff, leaving its ownership uncertain. If this hypothesis is untrue, though, I'd strongly suspect that Cerence is the owner, not Microsoft.
deleted 5y ago
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sigg3 5y ago
> You have eSpeak, which is GPL V3, so including it in your own software is a problem. Can't you just include it like a separate module and provide any improvements to it specifically upstream?
- miki123211 5y ago
  If you're doing this on Linux, you get IPC-related (or worse, process-creation-related) latency. This is not a problem for i.e. occasional weather announcements, but is a big issue when . creating things for the blind. If the speech synthesizer speaks each time you press a key, and you generally need to know what it said to. decide if you want to scroll further or open the focused item, every bit of latency matters. That's one of the reasons why blind people prefer robotic-sounding speech synthesizers; they're usually less CPU-intensive, which increases responsiveness. If the device you're developing for uses some proprietary firmware, a custom module might not even be an option.
simion314 5y ago
If you make a product then why not run the GPL code as a background application and you send it commands on what to speak? It would be fair to contribute back any improvements if you would able to add to the GPL stuff.

mwcampbell 5y ago

Do you happen to know if ETI-Eloquence is now owned by Cerence, or if Microsoft got it with the Nuance acquisition? I'm afraid I was a little too eager to suggest that Microsoft open-source Eloquence when the news of the Nuance acquisition first came out.

miki123211 5y ago
Vocalizer is definitely Cerence, that I'm sure of. All the automotive stuff, which Vocalizer is a part of, was spun off before the acquisition. As an aside, because of Vocalizer's use in automotive, it will probably be the only high-ish quality speech engine that won't become fully cloud-based. VFO's claims about the continued use of Vocalizer in JAWS seem to confirm that. Regarding Eloquence itself, its status is not really known. I would be extremely surprised if it was owned by Microsoft, though. There's a hypothesis that nobody really knows who actually owns it, there were multiple companies that assisted in its development, including IBM. The product was so unimportant to Nuance these days that they might not even have considered it when doing the spinoff, leaving its ownership uncertain. If this hypothesis is untrue, though, I'd strongly suspect that Cerence is the owner, not Microsoft.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sigg3 5y ago

> You have eSpeak, which is GPL V3, so including it in your own software is a problem. Can't you just include it like a separate module and provide any improvements to it specifically upstream?

miki123211 5y ago
If you're doing this on Linux, you get IPC-related (or worse, process-creation-related) latency. This is not a problem for i.e. occasional weather announcements, but is a big issue when . creating things for the blind. If the speech synthesizer speaks each time you press a key, and you generally need to know what it said to. decide if you want to scroll further or open the focused item, every bit of latency matters. That's one of the reasons why blind people prefer robotic-sounding speech synthesizers; they're usually less CPU-intensive, which increases responsiveness. If the device you're developing for uses some proprietary firmware, a custom module might not even be an option.

simion314 5y ago

If you make a product then why not run the GPL code as a background application and you send it commands on what to speak? It would be fair to contribute back any improvements if you would able to add to the GPL stuff.