espeak-ng VS Simple-Contacts

I'm skeptical about a senior JavaScript developer claiming to be bored. Nonetheless, let's see. How would you go about modifying [this](ng/blob/master/emscripten/espeakng_glue.idl) IDL file, this C++ glue code, and the relevant Make file to compile eSpeak NG to JavaScript with Emscripten with SSML support enabled?

eSpeak NG supports running on Linux, BSD, Mac, Android, Windows, has been compiled to WASM with Emscripten. See also espeak and meSpeak.js.

I may have a solution, BUT I'm at an airport right now, so... Perhaps tonight I can give you some ideas. There is a program I used to make a few presets for myself. https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/languages.md

For this one, I used espeak (https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng) as a text processor. It is almost 17 years old software and is pretty lacking, unfortunately. On the other hand, it's super fast and supports tens of languages. Long story short, punctuation introduces phrase break with a pause of fixed length, and capitalization is ignored.

I didnt not release trainy parts to build voices. I am considering, but there is so many packages already (coqui, espnet, piper, nemo, fairseq to name a few) that i focused on usability for now. Support for new languages is a different question. Everyone wants to train fancy neural nets. But support for new language is about writing rules and having language expertise. I did it for English (https://github.com/balacoon/en_us_normalization/tree/c1019cf878aa6baf25d6fff719cf418cca5a3107/production/classify). Doing it for all the other languages would probably take me a lifetime. Other speech synthesis solutions use 17-years old espeak for this purpose (https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/languages.md). I introduced the fallback to it in Balacoon too. But generally, it is outdated technology and I believe we should do better.

espeak-ng works by first converting text to IPA and then pronouncing that. But im not sure im aware of a way to input arbitrary IPA, and also the quality is probably too low for you.

There are espeak-ng https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng and pocketsphinx https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx which can be used locally without making external requests.

There are automatic tools to convert a written form of a language to IPA, I'm personally aware of espeak-ng, which supports* a lot of languages.

I've had good luck with https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng (for very specific purposes, and I was willing to wrangle IPA)

Web Speech API does not provide a means to capture audio output of speechSynthesis.speak(new SpeechSynthesis.speak()). Using Native Messaging we start a local server, send input text or SSML to the local server with fetch(), pass the input data to local speech synthesis engine, in this case espeak-ng, get response back as WAV in the browser, which we parse to Float32Array and write to a MediaStreamTrackGenerator which we then output speakers and/or share with peers (https://github.com/guest271314/native-messaging-espeak-ng; https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/tree/master/chromium_extension).

For Contacts -> https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Contacts

"Simple Contacts" https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Contacts or "ContactYou" https://github.com/Bnyro/ConnectYou

Don't use that app, and disable it if you can. Use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simplemobiletools.contacts / https://f-droid.org/packages/com.simplemobiletools.contacts.pro if you can, no funny business with this amazing open-source (https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Contacts) app

What happens if you try a third-party contact app like Simple Contacts?

Simple Contacts Pro (version 6.19.1): Contacts address book for managing recent contacts and vcf contact backups

Simple Contacts Pro (version 6.19.0): A premium app for contact management with no ads, supports groups and favorites

I bought Simple Contacts Pro, it's great but it has enough papercuts to where I went back to True Phone. Here are my bug reports:

Set default phone number for contact: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Contacts/issues/...

Cannot create new group (category) for Nextcloud account/address book: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Contacts/issues/...

Favorites tab showing contacts from all accounts: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Contacts/issues/...

That's weird, does it work when using another contacts app such as Simple Contacts?