Pink-Trombone VS espeak-ng

Too late to edit, but to any one who needs "convincing" of the flexibility of a formant synthesizer, you should 1) play with Pink Trombone[1], a Javascript formant synthesizer with a UI that lets you graphically manipulate a vocal tract, and 2) have a look at this programmable version of it[2]

[1] https://dood.al/pinktrombone/

[2] https://github.com/zakaton/Pink-Trombone

Can I do it automatically without any audio/voice recordings at all, such as taking advantage of the pink trombone linguistics tool, (for which there is some source code)?

Yeah, it would be nice if the financial backing behind Rhasspy/Piper led to improvements in espeak-ng too but based on my own development-related experience with the espeak-ng code base (related elsewhere in the thread) I suspect it would be significantly easier to extract the specific required text to phonemes functionality or (to a certain degree) reimplement it (or use a different project as a base[3]) than to more closely/fully integrate changes with espeak-ng itself[4]. :/

It seems Piper currently abstracts its phonemize-related functionality with a library[0] that currently makes use of a espeak-ng fork[1].

Unfortunately it also seems license-related issues may have an impact[2] on whether Piper continues to make use of espeak-ng.

For your specific example of handling 1984 as a year, my understanding is that espeak-ng can handle situations like that via parameters/configuration but in my experience there can be unexpected interactions between different configuration/API options[6].

[0] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper-phonemize

[1] https://github.com/rhasspy/espeak-ng

[2] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper-phonemize/issues/30#issueco...

[3] Previously I've made note of some potential options here: https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/notes_public/-/blob/main/note...

[4] For example, as I note here[5] there's currently at least four different ways to access espeak-ng's phoneme-related functionality--and it seems that they all differ in their output, sometimes consistently and other times dependent on configuration (e.g. audio output mode, spoken punctuation) and probably also input. :/

[5] https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/floss-various-contribs/-/blob...

[6] For example, see my test cases for some other numeric-related configuration options here: https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/floss-various-contribs/-/blob...