Yeah, it would be nice if the financial backing behind Rhasspy/Piper led to improvements in espeak-ng too but based on my own development-related experience wit

Yeah, it would be nice if the financial backing behind Rhasspy/Piper led to improvements in espeak-ng too but based on my own development-related experience with the espeak-ng code base (related elsewhere in the thread) I suspect it would be significantly easier to extract the specific required text to phonemes functionality or (to a certain degree) reimplement it (or use a different project as a base[3]) than to more closely/fully integrate changes with espeak-ng itself[4]. :/ It seems Piper currently abstracts its phonemize-related functionality with a library[0] that currently makes use of a espeak-ng fork[1]. Unfortunately it also seems license-related issues may have an impact[2] on whether Piper continues to make use of espeak-ng. For your specific example of handling 1984 as a year, my understanding is that espeak-ng can handle situations like that via parameters/configuration but in my experience there can be unexpected interactions between different configuration/API options[6]. [0] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper-phonemize https://github.com/rhasspy/piper-phonemize [1] https://github.com/rhasspy/espeak-ng https://github.com/rhasspy/espeak-ng [2] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper-phonemize/issues/30#issuecomment-1992628787 https://github.com/rhasspy/piper-phonemize/issues/30#issueco... [3] Previously I've made note of some potential options here: https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/notes/notes--text-to-speech.md https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note... [4] For example, as I note here[5] there's currently at least four different ways to access espeak-ng's phoneme-related functionality--and it seems that they all differ in their output, sometimes consistently and other times dependent on configuration (e.g. audio output mode, spoken punctuation) and probably also input. :/ [5] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/floss-various-contribs/-/blob/main/espeak/mirror/espeak-demo.py#L525 https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/floss-various-contribs/-/blob... [6] For example, see my test cases for some other numeric-related configuration options here: https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/floss-various-contribs/-/blob/main/espeak/mirror/espeak-demo.py#L754 https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/floss-various-contribs/-/blob...