Initial release of gnuspeech available

Posted Oct 22, 2015 17:47 UTC (Thu) by deltasquared (guest, #99235)
In reply to: Initial release of gnuspeech available by hummassa
Parent article: Initial release of gnuspeech available

This sounds awesome. For those who haven't listened to it, it sounds like a person's voice passed through filters to create robotic sci-fi sounding speech, while still retaining a human quality. Except it's actually been generated by a program.

The intonation of sentence structure is there, like rises in pitch towards the end of certain clauses. Of course it lacks emotional intonation (it was only reading text from the article), however I imagine that wouldn't be too hard to add. (Emotion tag chars in unicode, anyone?)

Personally I found the syllables at certain points too fast to keep up with, though time-stretching the audio fixes this.
It has the right delays elsewhere, like at commas and stops.

I wonder how easily it could be equipped with different voices, but as it stands I would totally have this read out stuff to me (possibly slowed down slightly).

Initial release of gnuspeech available

Posted Oct 22, 2015 18:35 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> This sounds awesome. For those who haven't listened to it, it sounds like a person's voice passed through filters to create robotic sci-fi sounding speech, while still retaining a human quality. Except it's actually been generated by a program.

I was going to say that it sounded like a human voice in a particular regional dialect after passing through a low-fidelity phone connection.

Seems like it's on the far edge of the uncanny valley, where it's starting to rise again without quite sounding *entirely* correct yet.

Initial release of gnuspeech available

Posted Oct 23, 2015 10:08 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (2 responses)

For me, it was incomprehensible. I did catch one or two words but that's all. Of course i'm not english native speaker, but I handle most case where people doesn't talk with accents that are too exotic.
Too fast, no accentuation, no pauses.
I don't think that can be considered better that output from other foss attempts I heard before.

Initial release of gnuspeech available

Posted Oct 25, 2015 7:23 UTC (Sun) by deltasquared (guest, #99235) [Link]

I think I appreciate where you're coming from. I can say it's like no accent I've ever heard before. That and the speed of some bits made portions of the speech impossible to understand.

As it stands, it does need a lot of work (sorry, I had no intention to infer otherwise, got a bit ahead of myself). What I found exciting was that I personally think the sample clip has the right bits hidden in the sound somewhere - while it sounds weird atm, as josh replied here there's something to it that is uncanny in its approximation in human speech.

I feel that there's that potential there for gnuspeech to become a great speech synthesis tool. I haven't read the paper yet but it's method of simulating the human vocal system looks promising.

Initial release of gnuspeech available

Posted Nov 12, 2015 16:26 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>For me, it was incomprehensible. I did catch one or two words but that's all. Of course i'm not english native speaker, but I handle most case where people doesn't talk with accents that are too exotic

I am a native speaker, and I managed to understand *maybe* one word in ten. It would not be an exaggeration to say that that is literally the worst example of text-to-speech I've ever heard. So bad, in fact, that I get the impression the software was mistakenly set to a language other than English and then given English text to read, making it an unfair example.