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Is there any TTS engine which isn't based on English? I'd love to be able to use an assistant device in Croatian in my lifetime.

by baxuz 4y ago

rjzzleep 4y ago
I have the same with other languages. One thing that I find fascinating is that while all the western TTS and language understanding frameworks allow only one at the time. The Chinese ones happily do Chinese and English at the same time. I recently tried out the open source android TTS engines and they don't seem all that great even though there's been years of development on them. Can anyone that knows comment on what the complexity here is?
- numpad0 4y ago
  As a native Japanese and sort-of English speaker, I need to pause flush audio pipeline to switch between languages. Konnichiwa spoken in the middle of an English sentence and こんにちは in native Japanese, are separate expressions and have to be pronounced differently. From my experience there likely isn't a single unified language model inside a human head, and if so it's not a surprise to me that one cannot be effortlessly made for computers.
follower 4y ago
While these Free/Open Source licensed TTS engines have a "relatively large" number of non-English voice options neither seems to include Croatian. * https://rhasspy.github.io/larynx/ https://rhasspy.github.io/larynx/ * https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-3-preview/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-3-preview/ (forthcoming, currently in beta, actively looking for feedback on non-English language quality) From a quick look here, there didn't seem to be any Croatian open source data options either: * https://openslr.org/resources.php https://openslr.org/resources.php I have a vague recollection that there was at least one (I think) Eastern European country that managed to get government funding in order to support creation of local language assistive device text to speech. So, it doesn't seem like an impossible task but certainly a non-zero amount of work to collect & process appropriate audio data. Hope you get your dream at some point in future. (As everyone deserves assistive devices in their own language.)
- baxuz 4y ago
  Yeah. Most of Ex-Yugoslavian languages (The southwest Slavic group) are basically the same. Much along the lines of US vs UK English. Slovenian and Macedonian are also quite understandable. Hopefully advances in AI will allow for a more general approach which will accelerate the development of these technologies.

Is there any TTS engine which isn't based on English? I'd love to be able to use an assistant device in Croatian in my lifetime.

by baxuz 4y ago

Is there any TTS engine which isn't based on English? I'd love to be able to use an assistant device in Croatian in my lifetime.

rjzzleep 4y ago

I have the same with other languages. One thing that I find fascinating is that while all the western TTS and language understanding frameworks allow only one at the time. The Chinese ones happily do Chinese and English at the same time. I recently tried out the open source android TTS engines and they don't seem all that great even though there's been years of development on them. Can anyone that knows comment on what the complexity here is?

numpad0 4y ago
As a native Japanese and sort-of English speaker, I need to pause flush audio pipeline to switch between languages. Konnichiwa spoken in the middle of an English sentence and こんにちは in native Japanese, are separate expressions and have to be pronounced differently. From my experience there likely isn't a single unified language model inside a human head, and if so it's not a surprise to me that one cannot be effortlessly made for computers.

follower 4y ago

While these Free/Open Source licensed TTS engines have a "relatively large" number of non-English voice options neither seems to include Croatian. * https://rhasspy.github.io/larynx/ https://rhasspy.github.io/larynx/ * https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-3-preview/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-3-preview/ (forthcoming, currently in beta, actively looking for feedback on non-English language quality) From a quick look here, there didn't seem to be any Croatian open source data options either: * https://openslr.org/resources.php https://openslr.org/resources.php I have a vague recollection that there was at least one (I think) Eastern European country that managed to get government funding in order to support creation of local language assistive device text to speech. So, it doesn't seem like an impossible task but certainly a non-zero amount of work to collect & process appropriate audio data. Hope you get your dream at some point in future. (As everyone deserves assistive devices in their own language.)

baxuz 4y ago
Yeah. Most of Ex-Yugoslavian languages (The southwest Slavic group) are basically the same. Much along the lines of US vs UK English. Slovenian and Macedonian are also quite understandable. Hopefully advances in AI will allow for a more general approach which will accelerate the development of these technologies.