@hosford42 @dpnash Compare that with the version of GNU Speech released in 1995. It still messes up "tear" and "live". But once you get past the unnatural voice, it's far more precise. And once you get used to it, much much easier to listen to at an extremely high rate of speed (4x or more) all […]

@hosford42 @dpnash For example, here's Eleven Labs, the billion dollar voice AI company that's supposed to replace all voice actors forever. I used the voice builder to specifically request received pronunciation. That was not at all what I got. Aside from that, notice the incorrect "tear" […]

@dpnash @hosford42 Right, but most text to speech systems have a UK English setting. And the mistakes they're making are on things much more basic than that. For example, far too many so-called state of the art AI TTS systems can't even pronounce "Susy", "plaid", "fuchsia", and "lieutenants".

@hosford42 I wish it would. Unfortunately, that code is what we use to keep Eloquence alive in the 64-bit NVDA version. So it's awful, for dozens of reasons. This...is a bit clearer? Maybe? Anyway, it's the canonical example of how NVDA officially wants to interact with a text to speech system […]

@hosford42 When it comes to requirements, in general, if it can work with both the SAPI5 and NVDA addons API, it will suit the requirements of speech dispatcher on Linux and the mac API's. The important thing is that most screen readers want to register indexes and callbacks. So, for example, if […]

@hosford42 Absolutely yes to all of the above. I can think of another 10 people on Mastodon at minimum who are also ready and willing to help where ever they can. Just none of us with the skillset to do the actual work.

@hosford42 Sadly, this is so far outside of my expertise and abilities it's not even funny. I have an excellent handle on what's needed, and the vague shape of the path forward, but actually doing any of it is way outside of my skillset. If it was anywhere near something I could do, I would have […]

@hosford42 Also, if you enjoy comparing modern AI efforts with older rule-based text to speech systems, and listening to the AI fail hard, this text is wonderful for that. As far as I'm aware not a single text to speech system, right up to the modern day, can read this one hundred percent […]

@hosford42 If you're going to reimplement something, you might be better to go with gnuspeech, as it's known to be in the GPL. At the least, it gives you a vocal model to improve on, that was coded with open research in mind, rather than proprietary code probably written for job security.

@hosford42 I also have no idea about any associated IP or patents, though. Wouldn't whoever does it need to be able to prove they never saw the original code, just its outputs? Otherwise you're still infringing, aren't you? In this regard, it's probably actually a bad thing that the dectalk […]

@hosford42 In general, for training the rules for pronouncing English, the CMU pronouncing dictionary is used: www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict

When it comes to open-source speech data, LJSpeech is the best we have, though far from perfect: keithito.com/LJ-Speech-Dataset/

And here's a […]

@hosford42 The sourcecode for dectalk is out there. Unfortunately, It's...legally dubious at best. It was leaked by an employee back in the day, and now the copyright status of the code is so unclear that nobody can safely use it for anything, but also nobody can demonstrate clear enough […]

@hosford42 The reason I say systems-level programming is mostly because for a text to speech system used by a blind power user, you need to keep an eye on performance. If the system crashes and the computer stops talking, the only choice the user has is to hard reset. It would be running and […]

@hosford42 Sadly, there is no money in solving any of my problems. If there was, someone would have solved them. See, for example, my complaints about text to speech systems. stuff.interfree.ca/2026/01/05/ai-tts-for-screenreaders.html

I can go into more detail about why all the options are bad […]

@jscholes Maybe. I've played enough of this style of game that I have pretty strong opinions about how it should all work, though.

@jscholes If I ever finish the basics, the thing I'm aiming for, probably in 70 years or so, is a singleplayer trade wars/elite style space game. Planetary exploration, trading, combat, procedurally generated galaxy, etc. All the stuff we have in that style is either multiplayer PVP, or only […]

@jscholes Hah. So this all started when I decided I wanted a class where I could create a new menu, add the selection key, a name, and a callback function for each item, then call the menu to print itself and do all the input and error checking, and call the callback for whatever item was chosen […]

@jscholes If I do it that way, it just means refactoring later, though. And that's even harder and less fun because now you're rebuilding things that already exist.