Hi.

I have to admit that I'm not impressed by these voices. They're too

jerky, even more so than the previous expressive versions. Even the

conversational one is pretty bad about it, though i I like how it allows

the artifacts of her voice to show through, you can actually hear her

vocal artifacts like at one point her voice croaked a little, but it was

clearly the real deal rather than concatenation problems. The built in

google voices on Android are starting to get it right, the male one is

expressive and reasonably smooth while some of the vocal artifacts are

being represented.

In my opinion, most of the concatenated voices are not reproducing very

well. They're nearly all jerky, and their intonation is just goofy. And

that goes for everybody. About the only ones who don't screw up the

inflections is the ones that don't actually do much of it to begin with,

Cepstral comes to mind.

For Nuance, a couple of the later versions of Tom are pretty good, as is

Samantha, but the rest meh.

Ivona is amazing at not being jerky, but they somehow are difficult to

understand, like they're just muttering along or something although

Sally isn't quite so bad as Joey and the others. I vaguely think the

Alexa voice is based off of one of the Ivona voices but I don't know

that for a fact. She is an incredible voice, but being a female, I

understand very little that she says, significantly reducing the actual

usefulness of the echo devices for me. I do much better using the male

voice for the google home devices. I prefer the one called pink although

it has been a while and that voice may not be called that anymore.

Out of all voices I still find Eloquence and ESpeak, in that order, to

be the easiest to understand for my hearing. I even have difficulty

understanding DeCtalk. The only DeCtalk voices I really understand well

are the earliest ones like 1.8, and the speechmaster2000 that sounds

vaguely similar to very old DeCtalk. Anything newer has a really odd

artifact where it starts tumbling when it gets to read anything that is

longer than 5 words or so. The syllables get shortened and it stops

anunsiating clearly, which, by the way, is another thing that I dislike

about the Nuance voices they all tend to do that too, one notable

exception is Tom. Apple's Alex voice does this badly although it can be

somewhat reduced by running at a very slow speed. It's like those voices

get distracted with what they are reading and they forget to read out

clearly, and so they just start muttering to themselves. Ivona's voices

did not do that.

One of my favorite voices that I forgot to mention is the LH True Voice

peter. Very plane, sharp, smooth and consistent the only problem was all

the spelling and the excessive inflection when encountering exclamation

marks. That is one somewhat human sounding voice that I can actually

understand well enough to read emails with.

The main reason that I use Android is because I can put Eloquence on it.

Using the iPhone with the Alex voice is doable, but tends to be a lot

more stressful just for struggling to understand him. If I'm in a car

there is an even wider gap between them, because I am so good at

understanding Eloquence that I only need bits and pieces to make out

what is being said where other voices I really need to hear everything

very clearly and even that's no guarantee. Of course, ESpeak is also

good enough to use I just hate the sound of it.

RH voice is getting there, it vaguely reminds me of the above mentioned

LH True voice, but it's too much bass and too little mids and highs.

They're a bit quiet. I don't find myself easily able to read emails with

them yet.

Cheers:

Aaron Spears, AKA Valiant8086 General Partner at Valiant Galaxy Associates "we make (VERY GOOD AUDIOGAMES) for the blind comunity" http://valiantGalaxy.com

On 9/11/2020 1:14 PM, Gene wrote:

> The web page where you can read about the voices and find samples is:

> https://nextup.com/cerence/

> 

> Gene

> -----Original Message----- From: Leslie

> Sent: Friday, September 11, 2020 9:57 AM

> To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

> Subject: Re: [nvda] nuance cerence neural tts for NVDA?

> 

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> Sent from Mail for Windows 10

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> From: Gene

> Sent: Friday, September 11, 2020 7:23 AM

> To: nvda@nvda.groups.io

> Subject: Re: [nvda] nuance cerence neural tts for NVDA?

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> There is nothing wonderful about those voices.

> 

> Zoey sounds as though she's gargling a little and has stilted inflection.

> 

> She sounds to me as though she is on downers.  The other voice I

> sampled has

> 

> stilted inflection and artifacts as well.  They may be better than the

> 

> Nuance voices that came before, but until these newer synthesizers

> sound as

> 

> good as the Google Assistant or Alexa, or other such very high quality

> 

> speech found in digital assistants, I'll consider them not worth using.

> 

> 

> 

> Gene

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Josh Kennedy

> 

> Where do you find them and how much are they?  I loved the nuance

> voices that I heard before.  I know you don’t like them, Jean, but I’d

> like to hear samples.  I’m one of those people who like to change

> voices every once in a while.  I have many voices on my phone.  They

> add variety as I work.Sent: Friday, September 11, 2020 8:39 AM

> 

> To: nvda@groups.io

> 

> Subject: [nvda] nuance cerence neural tts for NVDA?

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> Hi,

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> Does anyone know if atguys or some other company will be selling the new

> 

> Cerence vocalizer deep AI voices for NVDA? Nextup sells them for their

> text

> 

> aloud product and they sound really good. Voices like conversational Zoey

> 

> sound quite good.

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> Josh

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> Sent from Mail for Windows 10

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