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I find that people who have never used text to speech think that the closer it is to real speech the better it is. Which is simply not the case. Artificial sp
by kongin 5y ago
I find that people who have never used text to speech think that the closer it is to real speech the better it is.
Which is simply not the case.
Artificial speech is to human speech what typography is to handwriting.
For example espeak is by far my number one choice for reading anything, because the voice models it uses can be sped up to 1k wpm and still be understandable. This is basically a superpower when skimming boring documentation of any type. Throw in basic tesseract OCR and in a 45 minute sitting I can go through 30k words of any document that can be displayed on a computer screen.
It's not that I'm stuck with a terrible robotic voice, it's that I don't want anything "better" in the same way that I don't see much value going past the command line for most tools when you can use ncurses.
- simion314 5y agoSame here, so for accessibility reasons current voices are good enough, but I admit at the beginning I lost a lot of time trying to find good voices, until I trained myself with faster speeds. So probably most people here researched this topic not for accessibility reasons but for "commercial" stuff like creating some kind of service where chat bots could speak to you or transcribe articles for some regular people(without eye problems) to listen to them.
- toast0 5y agoIt depends on the use case. For a lot of people who don't use TTS directly, we're exposed to it through public announcement systems on transit/airports and phone systems, or sometimes voice verification codes. More natural speech patterns would be useful in those venues.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y agoI wonder if people will hit an uncanny valley here: my experience with video animation was that sometime around “The Polar Express” animated movie makers realized that audiences didn’t really want more and more realistic animation.
- toast0 5y agoI think there's certainly a good enough point, yeah. But last time I was on a CalTrain platform, their TTS announcement still couldn't pronounce CalTrain, unless it's expected to be pronounced call train.
- rockemsockem 5y agoWould this be true for things like audiobooks and particularly interesting long-form articles on the web that you actually want to listen to as opposed to "getting through"?
- kongin 5y agoI find that listening to them multiple times is much better value for time than just doing it once.