TTS voices that sound nice?
There are multiple screenreaders but their voices simply suck. KDEs espeak has way worse voices than Android eSpeak for some reason.
There is Thorsten Voice, a grest project that sounds really nice.
Not sure if he has a espeak dataset too.
Do you know any others?
Its essential for blind people, I dont think any blind person uses Linux if they have to hear these robot voices every day.
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espeak default voice backend is synthesized without using actually real voice samples. So it doesn't require downloading a huge package for each language, which is convenient in some cases, but the outcome is extremely robotic.
You can use MBROLA as backend for espeak so that it uses some voice samples and the result should be less jarring (it'd still be easy to tell it's not natural voice, but at least you'd be able to understand it better). There's a tutorial on this here: https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/mbrola.md
Or you can try piper (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper) it's one of the most natural-sounding TTS (here are some samples).
Piper is pretty good, thank you!
In addition to the very insightful reply by Ferk: Sadly most TTS development seems to be happening as online service these days. Google Neural TTS and Microsoft Azure TTS sound really great but require an online connection, an account, and possibly even paying (there's a threshold until it's free, then it costs almost nothing but almost nothing isn't free).
Btw, I don't know about the blind people you know but the ones I know use so insanle fast TTS output, the "sounds nice" aspect isn't really there in the first place. At least not to me.
The development of Piper is being driven by the Home Assistant Project. That probably makes it one of the larger OSS TTS projects. Hope may not be lost yet ;)
And then we'll live in a TikTok TTS hellscape. 🤣
https://weilbyte.github.io/tiktok-tts/
https://github.com/Weilbyte/tiktok-tts
Okay that is really interesting, so a TTS engine should be optimized to run very fast.
Here is one of the best
https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts
A few days ago I wrote down a couple of links to interesting TTS projects that I was going to look into whenever I have time, along with some brief notes.
https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS TTS + XTTS, GPU inference? 3GB model.
https://github.com/rhasspy/piper Low resource, CPU inference. 50MB model.
https://github.com/p0p4k/vits2_pytorch GPU inference? 500MB model. https://github.com/p0p4k/vits2_pytorch/discussions/27 Someone's models for vits2
https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech the best quality available that I've seen
That says it is speech to text, not text to speech
He probably meant https://commonvoice.mozilla.org
Omg is that the data from the Common voice project? Nice!
So it is, that's why some languages don't have good support yet - not enough recordings
Also the last release is very old. Mozilla is weird, their pinned projects are often dead or outdated...
I've recently made aware of the bark project. Especially the bark-ui project. It takes a long time to run but it does work. Sometimes it makes cursed stuff too: https://social.rootaccess.org/@michaelc/111277260439738652
Wow that is crazy! 10seconds sounds like an unnecessary flex though, wouldnt like 30min/all sounds be best?
I have a tiny laptop with the literal bare minimum to get this running haha. Your probably right but the models explode your memory pretty quick.
I did get some really good audio out of this model after a while. I threw the first chapter of the hobbit at it and it seemed to be doing ok. It's better than espeak and you only need to do it once to get audiobooks out.
I have to check that! But wait is that Windows only?
I got it working on Ubuntu/PopOS.
Not sure if this is gonna be much better than the alternatives you've listed, but you can try adjusting pitch, rate, range, etc. with spd-say.
If you don't mind doing some development work, needing online connectivity, and paying for usage, AWS's Polly has some very good sounding TTS voices: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/
Hm, as a backup that could be okay, but not working offline /without being a huge privacy problem...
Samsung's TTS engine for android is the best I have found. I use it to listen to epub books.
Not FOSS.
Samsung sucks though... also softwarewise. Like, I debloated many phones and Samsung is crazy.
https://github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/Android-Tipps/tree/main/debloat
So their TTS will probly neither work offline, nor standalone