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   13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 28-Mar-2024 03:01:25 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

   I have an #accessibility question for #blind and #PartiallySighted users who use text-to-speech tools.

   Has the recent development of machine-learning based synthetic voices such as Piper, Coqui, Mimic3 and Amazon Polly had any useful impact for you, or do you still use e-speak style voices?

   Do the tools you regularly use support "Neural Voices" of the kind mentioned above?

   I've noticed that integration is limited - for example, I can get transcription and reading tool Speech Note (https://flathub.org/apps/net.mkiol.SpeechNote) to read me anything I like in a range of up-to-date voices, but Gnome Orca - my OS-wide screen reader - remains intensely hard to customise.

   But I'm a Linux user, and thus aware that accessibility remains an embarrassingly low priority in practical open source development, even where the component parts exist.

   For example, few of the projects linked by the Piper team (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper?tab=readme-ov-file#people-using-piper) are focused on accessibility.

   • Embed this notice
     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 28-Mar-2024 03:09:19 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     in reply to

     Holy crap, some awesome person has made a Piper integration for Orca

     https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/issues/285

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     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 28-Mar-2024 03:20:12 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     in reply to

     • D.Hamlin.Music

     @dhamlinmusic It's outside the scope of what I'm currently looking at (which is desktop Linux flavoured) but I see that the sherpa-onnx project has been releasing APKs for a few months - I'll give them a go and report back.

     GitHub link:
     https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx

   • Embed this notice
     D.Hamlin.Music (dhamlinmusic@dragonscave.space)'s status on Thursday, 28-Mar-2024 03:20:13 JST D.Hamlin.Music

     in reply to

     @HauntedOwlbear I would love one of these for #android, the TTS engine options are rather limited.

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     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 28-Mar-2024 03:33:16 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     in reply to

     • D.Hamlin.Music

     @dhamlinmusic yeah, a lot of these projects are very much "sideload these six things", which is less than entirely helpful sigh

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     D.Hamlin.Music (dhamlinmusic@dragonscave.space)'s status on Thursday, 28-Mar-2024 03:33:17 JST D.Hamlin.Music

     in reply to

     @HauntedOwlbear Ah yeah I’m talking through the store, and knowing for sure up front that it'll be able to be set as engine for #talkback.