Hello Jow Forums Tell me how do you use Text to speech? What programs do you use? What voices do you install? What are the most unique voices? The most realistic? The best programs?
I basically use balabolka myself and started installing IVONA voices.
The biggest problem I see(in balabolka and others I tried ) is that there is no "save" voice configuration. For example if I mess around with the pitch and speed there is no way to save this config and any changes in the voice will forget my configuration.
I like to know how to fix this.
Whoever is new to TTS feel free to ask why we use them if you have no idea.
I made this for you: streamable.com/5vwc0 Made on loonix with installed MS-Sam TTS.
Christopher Morgan
>Are you non-verbal too? No. I simply love to simply generate audio books by taking the text and generating a computer voice or not reading long wall of text and simply having it play for me.
Once you go this way you see that librevox is shit and this is the only way to enjoy fan fiction.
Tell me about what you know about text to speech I want to learn everything there is to it. Also the "simulator" series uses generated speech.
Text to speech is a lie. Anytime you type words into text to speech, there is actually a man in India who receives it and reads it back to you in a computer voice.
I'm also interested in this topic. I like TTS for books and long articles. So far this is what I know: the best browser extension for TTS is Read Aloud (have to use in on Chrome for the best voices). There are better TTS services but they charge money. RA uses the Google Translate voices which are just fine. Unfortunately sometimes my wifi adapter shits itself when using this extension, on idea why. Maybe the nature of the web requests or something. So I use Bluestacks with Moon Reader and it works great
On my phone I use Moon Reader Pro, an excellent ebook reader which has the same TTS engine (sometimes you have to install Google Text to Speech from the Play Store before you can use it in the app).
Alexander Green
OP here. I never use browser crap.
This is mostly for windows(you can get it to work under wine)
I use balabolka like pointed out in the OP. Its a free program (not that we give a shit about this; piracy) after installing it it has an advanced interface. You can read in it, you have play(F5), pause(F6), stop(F7) [also GUI if you want] so the thing can read for you and you can pause it or even go back by stopping and clicking on the text where you want it to read.
The greatest fun with it is to render to a audio file (CTRL+W) so you can literally have a MP3 audio book to play on everything that understands MP3.
After you install a new TTS vice in windows it shows up in the program. I finally decided to install IVONA voices from some pirated source.
personally I'm addicted to MS-SAM because of his voice his unnatural robotic voice that I can crank up to a extreme speed and still understand what is being talked about perfectly. The natural voices become difficult to understand at hie speeds.
i recommend rendering it to MP3 every time and having it next to the TXT so you can throw it on your player and have your audio books.
Also Ii recommend using MS-SAM 5 or SAPI 5 SAM because SAM 4 has an error where he presences "on" as "in" every time while SAM 5 is free of this.
To get SAM 5 on anything after XP you need to use a special installer that fucks with the windows registry and installs it (I can give you the file if you want). To get more voices I think you can install speakonia (some other free crap) and it installs more voices into the OS.
installing voices in wine is difficult. You need to install speakonia to get any I think because speakonia is the only thing that will penetrate wine and install them.
However after using 3 installers you have balabolka with SAPI 4 voices (I can not get SAPI 5 to install in wine) so feel free to play around.
Oh and wine-balabolka can only save to wave because I think MP3 was under patent at the time and wine did not implement MP3 save functionality (maybe future version?). So the best render is under windows or VM. I use a XP machine for this purpose where I have balabolka installed.
If anyone can help me out with getting this to work under wine (SAPI 5 voices) I be happy. I can also share the installation files if someone needs them.
Be warned I got the SAPI 5 under win 7 + from a strange place that I still don't know if its some infected file (AV did not report anything so...)
Oh and there is also clip speak a GPL program that is the most fantastically crashing program in the world. Clip speak will read everything that you copy into the clipboard. not that the crashes are a problem since you can reactivate the program and nothing of value was ever lost. I think you can also configure windows balabolka to read form clipboard automatically, not sure under wine.
PS: Did you know? I can not remember how to write balabolka so I copy and past the name.
I'm not a big fan of robotic voices like Sam, it throws me off. I like the natural sounding voices for their better intonation, understanding of commas etc.
Alexander Russell
OP here with update. I can confirm you can use balabolka to read everything you select and copy. Its named "Clipboard watch" in the options menu or CTRL+SHIFT+W. Under my wine it dose nothing however in windows it will read everything you copy.
Ian Powell
>I'm not a big fan of robotic voices like Sam What do you normally listen to? You can try the IVONA voices if you want so pirate them and install in the OS to have them in the program.
Or give SAM a try trust me hi pronunciation is good. And after you get used to increasing the reading speed you can go crazy fast with SAM and understand everything speed reading at its best.
I want to get seriously into TTS now and try other voices. What can other gentoman recommend.
Carter Gutierrez
thanks for the info OP, I had no idea such a diverse and powerful tool as balabolka existed
