No, I'm not a fan of Eloquence. I liked Espeak from the first time I
heard it, and I now associate it with NVDA. I've been using it for six
years and I doubt I could become comfortable with any other voices at
this point. Also, I've spent a very long time putting together a
dictionary with over 400 entries to get Espeak to pronounce Pokémon and
characters' names correctly (some of my attempts have failed, but if
they had not the list would be longer) and that would mean having to do
that all over again for a new synth, which might not even be compatible
with newer versions of NVDA down the road unless I buy that other addon
I've heard about in the last year or something. And the Protalker addon
I have is linked to the default voices in the Protalker English option,
so if I ever went back to learning Japanese again, I'd have to use
Espeak for the English anyways.
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On 27/03/2018 2:05 AM, Ervin, Glenn wrote:
Do you not like Eloquence?
-----Original Message-----
From: nvda@nvda.groups.io [mailto:nvda@nvda.groups.io] On Behalf Of Sharni-Lee Ward
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2018 12:27 AM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: [nvda] I take it there have been no improvements to the flawed espeak ng in 2017.4?
I've just caught up on all my emails. If I understood an earlier thread correctly, despite our complaints when 2017.4 came out, the devs did not roll back the version of espeak packaged with NVDA to the version in 2017.3, which means that I will not be updating NVDA, despite the wonderful-sounding new features.
Espeak, and subsequently Espeak NG, has been my default synth since I started using NVDA. There was an issue in 2014 but I was able to get used to that, and then it got fixed, so I was contented. The problems I found in the espeak packaged with 2017.4 were more than I could stand, as someone who primarily uses NVDA to read fanfiction and my own stories. However, Espeak is among the only synths compatible with NVDA's inflection slider, which I have maxed out for optimal performance. I'm not about to sacrifice broad inflection for the drones of MS voices, and I'm currently using a Win 7 computer, but even if I was on a Win 10 one, the 1Core voices don't do it for me either. They're pleasant, but also flat. No inflection. No way to change the inflection. I can't stand human-sounding voices because they're less flexible than synthetic ones in this regard. Also, nearly all non Espeak voices are slow as well as flat, partially due to the length of pauses between clauses of a sentence, and this is about as unbearable as the flatness. And there is one more thing that really clinches my unwillingness to change synths. I cannot get anything else to cooperate with my speech dictionary. As I said, I read a lot of fanfiction, and I have put lots of characters'
names and the names of Pokémon into my dictionary so that they are pronounced properly. The other synths simply do not like these names, no matter what I try to do with them, and some of them even pronounced my name wrong, so I gave up on them.
This is why I want whoever's developing Espeak to roll back their changes to a previous version (surely they have older versions backed up somewhere. I would if I was developing something like this), and for NVDA to likewise roll back the version packaged with it until the devs of the synth work out how to alter one language without screwing up twenty others in the process. I know I can only go so far before I am forced to update to the latest version of NVDA or be left to languish as more and more things become incompatible with the last tolerable version I have.
Please, I am begging you, do something about this.
