-----Original Message-----
From: nvda@nvda.groups.io [mailto:nvda@nvda.groups.io] On Behalf Of Rob Hudson
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2018 3:37 PM
To: nvda@nvda.groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] I take it there have been no improvements to the flawed espeak ng in 2017.4?

Lino Morales <linomorales001@...> wrote:

I will never ever never ever never ever use ESpeak. Its horrid and like I've said billions of time on this this is a put off for people like my wife who is also blind and has a progressive hearing loss.

I couldn't agree more with this.
I, too, am blind with a severe--and progressive--hearing loss. To me, e squeak has always sounded like a guy with a clothespin on his nose scampering frantically to get out of a tin can. There is no resonance to the synth, what the synth developers call head size. So the sounds are pinched off and truncated, at least to my ears. In addition, it was designed by someone with a british accent, and its tones, inflections, and sentence emphasis patterns are those of british speech. This is not a problem by itself, but when combined with the other contributory factors, makes e speak something of a let down for those new to NVDA and hoping for a more pleasant screen reading experience.
There exists the option to modify voice files and create what are called variants, but the core engine is still the same, no matter how many modification one makes to these small files. It needs to be re-written from the ground up to fix all these problems which I and other users have brought up, both here and on other forums.