espeak-ng VS TTS

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 But generally, it is outdated technology and I believe we should do better.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).

Fast or good, choose one

Mozilla's TTS is a python package installable with pip and uses cpu or gpu resources to render a choice of voices, they mostly sound natural and this is the good. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

Mycroft's mimic3 is the default voice renderer for the Mycroft project that runs on pi hardware and sounds ok-ish, that is the fast. https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3

There are many others but these are the two I use according to if it needs to run on limited hardware or if the cycles fall freely from the sky.

Coqui-ai was a commercial continuation of Mozilla TTS and STT (https://github.com/mozilla/TTS).

At the time (2018-ish), it was really impressive for on-device voice synthesis (with a quality approaching the Google and Azure cloud-based voice synthesis options) and open source, so a lot of people in the FOSS community were hoping it could be used for a privacy-respecting home assistant, Linux speech synthesis that doesn't suck, etc.

After Mozilla abandoned the project, Coqui continued development and had some really impressive one-shot voice cloning, but pivoted to marketing speech synthesis for game developers. They were probably having trouble monetizing it, and it doesn't surprise me that they shut down.

An equivalent project that's still in active development and doing really well is Piper TTS (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper).

An RSS reader that integrates TTS (or TTS)

My solution would be to use a speech synthesis library, maybe eSpeak or Festival, just for ease of use; I think they each provide a library that you could use from C or C++ easily. This one from Mozilla is a more modern system with better-quality output, but it looks like it's set up to run through Python, and I haven't looked at it closely enough to see how much work it would be to get it working for you.

There is a lot of TTS and SST development going on (https://github.com/mozilla/TTS; https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech; https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice). That is the only way they work: Contributions from the wild.

unfortunately not yet. I need to expand the library of languages and voices. looking around, it seems only Coqui had some traction re Brazilian Portuguese: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/issues/160. If you foresee wide adoption of the tech for this locale, hit me up with DM

I haven't used it, but there's also mozilla/TTS.

Mozilla TTS

Instead, just use Firefox's open-source TTS model: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS