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Is there a high quality speech synthesizer (ideally local) for Mandarin you have found? There are some subtleties with tone sandhi rules and how they interact w

Is there a high quality speech synthesizer (ideally local) for Mandarin you have found? There are some subtleties with tone sandhi rules and how they interact with prosody that I feel are lacking with current TTS voices I’ve tried.

modeless 3y ago
The first one I plan to try is https://github.com/netease-youdao/EmotiVoice https://github.com/netease-youdao/EmotiVoice I don't have the expertise to judge the quality of Mandarin pronunciation myself, being a beginner. But it sounds OK in English and it's made by native Mandarin speakers in China so I expect that it sounds better in Mandarin than English.
- siraben 3y ago
  Sounds pretty good, although still lacking in natural-sounding tone sandhi (e.g. try 一下, it should be yi2xia4 instead of yi1xia4).
  - 999900000999 3y ago
    Do you have a favorite Chinese learning app ?
gattr 3y ago
I love the idea of LLMs being super-efficient language tutors. And you have a good point; coming soon: "We've been getting a lot of these tourists here lately, they're eerily fluent, but all seem to have the same minor speech impediment" (read: messed-up weights in a commonly used speech model).
- siraben 3y ago
  I've been using ChatGPT 4 to translate and explain various texts in Mandarin and it's been very on point (checking with native speakers from time to time, or internet searches). As expected, it has trouble with slang and cross-language loanwords from time to time. However for languages with much lower information online, it hallucinates like crazy. > coming soon: "We've been getting a lot of these tourists here lately, they're eerily fluent, but all seem to have the same minor speech impediment" Haha, if that were to pass, that would still be a far better outcome than our current situation of completely blind machine translation (this is especially for various Asian languages that are very sensitive to phrasing) and mispronunciation by non-native speakers.
- bityard 3y ago
  > all seem to have the same minor speech impediment Ah, that is called an accent.
  - dontupvoteme 3y ago
    Kind of, Accents are typically derived from the intersection of natural languages, specifically which ones you learned the phonetics of first. (With the exception of the Mid-Atlantic accent...) This would be something quite novel as the speech irregularities would not have their origin in people I don't know what you would call it but it needs at least some adjective before accent to differentiate it IMO
rnjesus 3y ago
the azure neural tts voices in chinese are the best i’ve heard, specifically the “xiaochen” voice. i use it in anki daily to generate sentences for my mandarin decks with an api key/plugin. it’s not something you run locally of course, but they have a decent enough free tier. i’m hoping a voice as realistic as this becomes a local app soon, but i’ve not found anything that’s nearly as natural sounding yet. (also, honorable mention to chatgpt’s “sky.” she pronounces mandarin with a funnily american accent, but it sounds natural and not as robotic as the open-source alternatives i’ve tried)

modeless 3y ago

The first one I plan to try is https://github.com/netease-youdao/EmotiVoice https://github.com/netease-youdao/EmotiVoice I don't have the expertise to judge the quality of Mandarin pronunciation myself, being a beginner. But it sounds OK in English and it's made by native Mandarin speakers in China so I expect that it sounds better in Mandarin than English.

siraben 3y ago
Sounds pretty good, although still lacking in natural-sounding tone sandhi (e.g. try 一下, it should be yi2xia4 instead of yi1xia4).
- 999900000999 3y ago
  Do you have a favorite Chinese learning app ?

gattr 3y ago

I love the idea of LLMs being super-efficient language tutors. And you have a good point; coming soon: "We've been getting a lot of these tourists here lately, they're eerily fluent, but all seem to have the same minor speech impediment" (read: messed-up weights in a commonly used speech model).

siraben 3y ago
I've been using ChatGPT 4 to translate and explain various texts in Mandarin and it's been very on point (checking with native speakers from time to time, or internet searches). As expected, it has trouble with slang and cross-language loanwords from time to time. However for languages with much lower information online, it hallucinates like crazy. > coming soon: "We've been getting a lot of these tourists here lately, they're eerily fluent, but all seem to have the same minor speech impediment" Haha, if that were to pass, that would still be a far better outcome than our current situation of completely blind machine translation (this is especially for various Asian languages that are very sensitive to phrasing) and mispronunciation by non-native speakers.
bityard 3y ago
> all seem to have the same minor speech impediment Ah, that is called an accent.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  Kind of, Accents are typically derived from the intersection of natural languages, specifically which ones you learned the phonetics of first. (With the exception of the Mid-Atlantic accent...) This would be something quite novel as the speech irregularities would not have their origin in people I don't know what you would call it but it needs at least some adjective before accent to differentiate it IMO

rnjesus 3y ago

the azure neural tts voices in chinese are the best i’ve heard, specifically the “xiaochen” voice. i use it in anki daily to generate sentences for my mandarin decks with an api key/plugin. it’s not something you run locally of course, but they have a decent enough free tier. i’m hoping a voice as realistic as this becomes a local app soon, but i’ve not found anything that’s nearly as natural sounding yet. (also, honorable mention to chatgpt’s “sky.” she pronounces mandarin with a funnily american accent, but it sounds natural and not as robotic as the open-source alternatives i’ve tried)