[arm-allstar] TTS translation options

[Neil k8it]

Chris,
Being legally blind I purchased a voice for my RPI, so I can hear the WX scripts etc.
I did like the audio quality  of Googles TTS and don't think the pricing is too bad. I do have a question about it. Does that price include the SPEECH TO TEXT service? I have need for it as well. Any thoughts?
BTW speech to text would make for some fantastic allstar scripts

Thanks
73 Neil Sablatzky  K8IT
Allstar Node 41838 KITLINK
Allstar Node 42087 KITLINK HUB
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Echolink K8IT-L
WIRES-X K8IT 11479 Room 21479


From: Chris Zenchenko 
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2015 5:07 PM
To: arm-allstar at hamvoip.org 
Subject: [arm-allstar] TTS translation options


Not to beat a dead horse but the loss of tts for the weather scripts has been a major frustration for me.

I spoke with Doug, Wa3DSP the other evening and mentioned I had been digging in to options.

The bottom line for distribution is free but as a blind user of speech synthesizers for as much as 16 hours per day I know quality matters.

I can live with poor but people in my office freak out when hearing even the better voices I have available.

I can think of several options but none of them are cheap or easy since you'd be looking at a Windows machine running to serve the speech.

Not really an option.

There are only a few voices that might run on the PI2 or the BBB.

We all know of them and none really match the Google output we got use to.

However I think that as Doug mentioned it might be possible to support options in any new scripts with the understanding that users would have to decide if a given service was worth paying for.

To that end I have located info on pricing for Google Translate:

https://cloud.google.com/translate/v2/faq?hl=en#pricing

I have not calculated how many characters a weather script might send in a month but I'd be surprised if it hit one million.

Still $20.00 is a bit much.

The other option is the Microsoft translation api.

https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/1899a118-d202-492c-aa16-ba21c33c06cb

It appears if I heard this right you have to create an account but then you could get up to two million characters per month free.

It might be possible for a club to set up an account and pay for more and then allow users to access the service with the club key.

I'm no expert on scripts or how this might work but I think it might be worth trying the MS route.

I can say that the voices with W7 and up are quite good and in W10 close to the best of my Voiceware reading voices.

VW's newest, James, is better than anything I've ever heard but it has issues for screen reader use.

Keeping in mind that a screen reader user expects a completely different set of parameters for quality speech if all you want is great output for average listeners over a node clearly MS or Google could handle it.

73

 



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