Re: Tips for speed reading /listening with screen readers
Gene
That's not surprising. I just looked it up
and it is a cloud-based system. It's interesting and I'm going to play
with the demo. But in fairness to Eloquence, it's like comparing a
calculator to a supercomputer. Eloquence is remarkably good for its
class.
Gene
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Nutt
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2018 4:23 PM
Subject: Re: [nvda] Tips for speed reading /listening with screen
readers Actually, Eloquence is beaten now for best pronunciation, by a synth that is not on Windows. Google TTS beats Eloquence hands down for pronunciation. I can’t find anything in the dictionary that it pronounces wrong, but I can with Eloquence. For example, Samhain, a Pagan festival is pronounced Sowan with a hard OW as in Cow, Eloquence completely mangles that and pronounces it Samhain as spelled.
Google One, Eloquence definitely Nil.
All the best
Steve
From:
nvda@nvda.groups.io <nvda@nvda.groups.io> On Behalf Of
Gene
What you listen to makes a difference, headphones allow for faster listening with fewer words missed at the same fast speed. But the most important thing is what synthesizer you use. I don't know about all the newer synthesizers so I don't know if any are as good at fast speeds as Eloquence. In general, they aren't. Eloquence is, in my sampling of synthesizers, the easiest to understand at fast speeds, 350, 400 or more words per minute. It pronounces more words correctly without correcting with a speech dictionary. The voice sounds annoying when listening at a normal rate. It sounds raspy. This raspiness is significantly reduced when listening at a fast rate and I don't find it bothersome. Perhaps at first, it might be and I might have found it so. But I quickly got used to it. At times, for pleasure reading of long sections of text, a book, a very long article, I use a different voice such as the Dectalk synthesizer.
But how anyone can stand most of the newer synthesizers is beyond my comprehension. They slur words when joining them, leave off certain sounds when joining words, pause at unnatural times, use unnatural inflections, and I don't recall if I've left anything out. these newer synthesizers work by sampling a specific person saying thousands or more words. Then the synthesizer joins these actually spoken words together into speech. They can produce words out of phonemes of the sampled voice as well but much of their speech is playing prerecorded words in the right order. Think of how you would speak if you had prerecorded words in your brain and you spoke by a system combining prerecorded words. Inflections would be wrong, words wouldn't be joined properly, in short, you would sound like these newer kind of synthesizers.
Gene ----- Original Message ----- From: Ervin, Glenn Sent: Monday, July 16, 2018 10:23 AM Subject: Re: [nvda] Tips for speed reading /listening with screen readers
I have found that what I am
listening to makes a difference too.
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