I really miss using a MacBook Air. My 2020 MacBook Air is not able to upgrade to Tahoe. I feel like it is really showing its age. I am interested as to how much better voiceover would perform on a new MacBook using the latest operating system. I usually mostly use it for work. I use the Messages app a lot because I text members of my team. I find that Google Chrome actually works better than Safari for most things that I do on the MacBook. Right now, I am bringing my windows computer back-and-forth from home to work. It works, but I don’t like the form factor of my PC as much as I did the MacBook Air. I don’t have the money to spend on it right now, but I am wondering if I should start saving and see what’s out there by the time the money comes in. If I had a nice new computer, and if VoiceOver was in better shape, I would love using the Mack.
@Bri It’s one of those situations where I really wouldn’t know how much better it works until I plunked down the money for a new computer and gave it a whirl. I have a sense that I would be fairly impressed, however.
@Bri What effect is that? I know there’s a reverb, but what’s the other thing that you did on it? It’s funny, I was actually going to ask you if you still had that producer tag because I was going to throw it in something as a joke.
As seen in a readme: * This program has no real license. Do whatever you want. Print out the source code, fold it into an ironic hat and sell it on * Etsy for all I care.
“…the answer to so many of the issues that are raised isn’t just switching to a new streaming app. The point is to encourage people to be more active participants in local music communities and DIY cultural production, and to support independent music media, buy music directly from artists, and reject the idea that it’s a one-click solution.”
People want to be able to click play and just listen to music. People want the ability to click a genre and listen to music in that genre, without having to actively choose what they listen to (kind of like what radio used to do in the old days, but without the useless banter, annoying commercials and the news, which they can get in other places). We can't change what people want. We can try giving it to them in a way that respects artists more. I think many people would pay 2x for their streaming service if they knew that the extra money was coming straight to artists, just as some people pay extra for vegan or locally-sourced or whatever. Trying to shift consumer behavior is futile, the market has spoken.
In a weird roundabout way, NOAA Weather Radio used Eloquence for its TTS from 2003 to 2016. I've been playing with the recently discovered SAPI 5 version of Speechify, and it's basically a concatenative version of Eloquence. The speech rules and pronunciations are quite similar, and some of the files include references to the Delta programming language which Eloquence was originally written in.
Incredible. Does it take the same phonemes, backquote tags, and such? If so, I wonder if forecast offices wrote pronunciation fixes the same way we have/do.
@NoahCarver Largely, yes. Though tags begin with \! instead of ` and some of them are modified from the originals, for example ts3, the radio pronunciation command, becoming tsR, the overall speech tag system is quite similar to Eloquence's, and it also accepts the same phonemes.
Aha. Final build of this for the night, going to relax in the hottub and not work on as much coding. However, a lot of language updates, including to US, Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese - many more language nuances are considered for them. Added: Mexican and Castilian Spanish. eurpod.com/nvSpeechPlayer-2025…
Thanks; In Brazilian Portuguese, the phonemes for R are fixed. The diphtongs are still too weak as I reported yesterday. In addition, the hard g before a vowel is odd, like in ga, go, gu. It sounds almost like a t. Lastly, some vowels need adjustments. The vowel u, for example, sounds like a British English u, and the ó (acute o) needs to be more open. Just to be sure, have you already applied the current ESpeak's pronounciations?
@clv1 haha sadly it's not just "applying Espeak's pronunciations" - it's literarly writing the shape, openness, sustainance, ETC for each sound from scratch. Even if ESpeak gives us how it says something, the actual sound-wave generation still takes place by the IPA tokenizer, so ipa.py feeds the frames to the wave player to synthesize based on those formant variables. As such it's possible to go into data.py and modify yourself if you look up the exact symbol for that sound in the table, but it's a lot of tweaking work because there's about 15-20 parameters per sound and right now about 140 sounds mapped.
OK thanks for explaining. One thing you could do in the future is to write down suggestions for whom wants to learn how to do this work, i.e. what documents he needs to read to learn how IPA works, what software can we use to manipulate all of those symbols and pipe them into a synthesiser, etc.
"Today is also about helping others make sense of this moment by reminding the world of what we already know: that Wikipedia is the backbone of information online, and that humans are at the center of it."
Wikimania is the annual conference celebrating all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation – Wikimedia Commons, MediaWiki, Meta-Wiki,Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikinews, Wikipedia , […]\n
I gave Pocket TTS a shot. It's a local AI voice that claims to run well on the CPU, so it's faster to generate output and doesn't require a GPU. The main problem with it is the same as with so many voices these days, AI or otherwise: punctuation. Periods and commas sound the same, and question marks aren't always noticeable. Parenthetical phrases sound odd, and the double dash isn't handled at all. I love seeing this field continue to move forward, but I have yet to meet an AI voice I like.
**UPDATE-very grateful that volunteer has been procured! I'm looking for someone in #Canada (preferably #Alberta ) who would be willing to receive (by mail) TWO different Apple 6.08 800k boot disks to see if you can boot your Mac Plus or SE from them. They simply get immediately ejected on my Mac Plus and this would help me troubleshoot the drive (which i've recently replaced). I will of course pay for shipping both ways. I live in Canmore, Alberta #retrocomputing
I’m having a bad ear day today. It happens to me sometimes, I get a day or three where one ear is basically useless. I am very thankful for Braille, because I proofed an important report using speech to the best of my current ability, and it all sounded fine and the spell checker reported no errors. But when I did a final check with Braille, I found I had written “paradigm shit” instead of “paradigm shift”. Oops, that would have been more than mildly embarrassing if I’d sent that off.
Stop the spread of AI Slop. Support your fellow human beings by investing your valuable time in their efforts. Not everything has to be a financial transaction. In this case, all it costs is a little time, which you’re clearly wasting right this very minute.
I invite you to come look around. Authentic stories, artfully told, and always 100% human. Sign up for free alerts to new stories. No spam. Just fantastic tales.
I tell stories. Most of them are true. A catalog of my many thoughts, rants, essays, and letters. I care little for your outrage, but I do feel your pain.
Today I learned about a particularly vile piece of shit corp, Bright Data. Web scraping as a service. They boast about having 150 million IP addresses from residential IPs and "real user devices" (I can't imagine that it's with the user's consent) and being able to scrape petabytes. They brag about their ability to defeat captchas, turning websites into AI data. Like every possible gross thing you can think of all wrapped up in a package with a shiny website bow.
Bright Data is awful, and their home users are willing participants, they offee "free" VPN service in exchange for exit nodes, like a malevolent TOR, their home users are presumably doing something "naughty" that they dont want their ISP or more legit VPNs knowing about. Bright Data probably sells the flow data anyway because they are deeply unethical.
At Vivaldi we continue to make choices that are different from our competitors. We have chosen to not integrate AI or crypto, but instead we integrate a wealth of other features, based on the wishes of our users.
We are a European company with most of the team based in Norway and Iceland, a few around Europe and a couple in the US.
Our servers are based in Iceland.
If you want to get away from Big Tech, maybe give us a try? If you are already using Vivaldi, maybe introduce your friends?
It’s a web browser. But fun. It comes with a bunch of clever features built-in. It’s super flexible and does not track you. Get the Vivaldi browser for desktop, mobile, and your car!
Last time I tried Vivaldi, I recall facing some #accessibility issues. Have you chosen to prioritize that aspect of user requested improvement, or should I look elsewhere? :)
Wondering if the end game here will be Trump saying "Fine you can keep Greenland but only if you keep a ton of NATO troops here" and then he can go "I made made NATO do their jobs, now we're safer than ever" RT: med-mastodon.com/users/cbarber…
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Troops from France, Germany, Norway, Sweden & other NATO allies are arriving in Greenland amid tensions over Trump’s repeated push for U.S. control of the island.
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok won’t be able to edit photos to portray real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal, according to a statement posted on X.
Saying bye to our princess tomorrow. She has a new mass in her lung right next to her heart, and a potential carcinoma in her GI. That’s 2 big things on top of her chronic other 10 things we’ve been managing for the last 8 years.
We didn’t know what to expect, adopting a senior kitty, but we found love and joy, that felt different from having a pet as a baby: that she knew life before us, and she chose and loved us as hard as we chose and loved her.
A single click mounted a covert, multistage attack against Copilot Exploit exfiltrating data from chat histories worked even after users closed chat windows. arstechnica.com/security/2026/…
Update Version 2.6 released for the Brailliant BI20X, Brailliant BI40X and the Mantis Q40. More information can be found here: humanware.com/en-usa/news/prod…
We’re thrilled to announce the release of our latest firmware update for the Brailliant BI X and Mantis braille display! This update introduces learning braille tables, a recording application and support for the upcoming eBraille format.
So, it's a bit unclear from the description. Does the recorder only exist on the BI40X or both 20 and 40? It says BiX only, but calls out the 40 specifically.
@BorrisInABox IMO they've always had pretty rough release notes, 40 only since that is the only display with a microphone. IMO a braille display does not need a microphone.
@BorrisInABox I could at least understand the speakers if they wanted to add support for NLS audio or something like that, or the TTS that they have already. I think that is a great idea, you have a little of a braille n speak thing going on without all the new fancy gadgetry of newer devices in that space.
@jpellis2008 That's why I said for my specific use case. I pretty much only use it as a terminal and notepad, can't hear the speech anyway. So I personally don't care about it, but others might.
Hi y’all. I’m thinking about buying a laptop, I already have it picked out and it seems to have good specs for the price. Since around 2016, my phone has been my main computing device. I briefly got acquainted with windows 11 a few years ago when I was using a small windows tablet lightly and sporadically. I used to be a fairly proficient or at least mediocre windows user 10 years ago and more. I just need to get familiar with things enough to be efficient again. I also would like to get more in to gaming. I like playing games and I have friends and a partner who game, and I feel like I’m missing out by not having pursued this earlier. I intend to use NVDA unless or until there’s something I come across that it can’t do. I plan to read the windows screenreader primer, which I believe just came out with its 3rd edition. My question is, would anybody be interested in helping me get back up to speed? Or helping me learn about games I can play with no vision? No pressure either way, I’ll figure things out a little at a time. But back when I was new with computers and games, knowing people made a world of difference. So I appreciate anything people are willing to give, whether it’s time or resources or anything else.
I went ahead and bought the laptop. I have started reading the Windows Screenreader Primer which is on its 4th edition, not 3rd. I’ve also gotten lots of input from here, Ramblio, and friends. My boyfriend even researched whether this particular laptop would be able to handle certain games. I’m a little intimidated by the prospect of getting as efficient with things as I used to be, but I know it just takes time. I went ahead and bought a gaming headset and a usb hub since this thing seems to have very few ports.
The only annoying thing about the implementation now is you have to read the original message before you can read the reply, it might be better to have that as a separate element or something. Or maybe just have an action that says "read original message" or similar.
Alright, I'm living up to the "vortex" that I used to use as a handle or part of a handle in various places. While looking at something else, I noticed that the at-spi2-core docs were lying and saying that every single enum value has existed since the beginning of time. Hopefully I've just fixed that and not broken something else while mucking around, but it was like a vortex hitting the docs, so no guarantees. Also just made a pyatspi maintenance release (and sent it to Tumbleweed). And now I'm done with anything remotely productive for today. I want some Thai food, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow.
Haven't heard of this app yet, but am wondering if I should check it out. What makes it cool, does it give you more control than most other apps over the mic processing/profiles being used? Have always wanted something like that for IOS.
I don't know about this one, but Twisted Wave (both the editor and free recorder version) allows you to bypass processing, select from three onboard mics in mono, or record in stereo (requires processing, because it's processing that makes stereo work in the first place). If I want a good, clean mono recording, I will often use the bottom mic in mono with no processing, then normalize/process later, since the iPhone has a very low fixed hardware gain at 30%.
@musicalman What I personally like about it is that you can record from the internal microphone/microphones and still use a bluetooth headset at the same time.
If you haven't figured it out yet, its in channel, Built-in Mic Stereo. If it doesn't show up try selecting stereo first then going back to that screen.
Lol I relate to this so hard, although in my case it's "stop being sad and go make a banger in Ableton / Logic / Reaper / whatever other DAW decides to become accessible next..."
I'm having an A&W chocolate Sundae pop. When you bring the can to your nose, you get an amazing chocolate aroma. It's weird and good at the same time. I wonder what it would taste if used as an ice cream float.
Ready for something that's going to blow your mind, especially my fellow folks with disabilities? Hold onto to your hats and other accessories because this one is wild. The other day, I got a text from an Orientation and Mobility instructor that I had worked with back in the day. For those who are confused, to put it simply, an Orientation and Mobility instructor is the person who teaches someone with a visual impairment how to get from point a to point b without getting killed. Anyway, said instructor asked for permission to use old pictures she had of me for a retirement party slideshow. I said yes. Nothing too out there, at least not yet. A friend of mine who also worked with her got the same text message, but then more. This instructor asked for a memory video to be recorded on a platform that's not accessible, which my friend explained to her. Instead of understanding, she straight up asked him if his sister could help him record the video. Okay fine, general populace deciding to be ignorant is one thing, but someone who teaches independence? This is a level of what the fuck I don't know if I can deal with.
@ZBennoui @shefoof Nah, I know it was the instructor. My friend was having the same conversation with her, he had been in contact with her before me, and also this woman texted my mother of all people because she saved her cell number from the application to the job readiness summer program she was working with me at when I was 16. Nope, it was her.
@ZBennoui @shefoof She texted my mom first, then she texted me. It was weird as hell for sure. I remember why I stopped keeping in contact with her, she could be a bit much sometimes.
@ZBennoui @shefoof Wait. Wait wait wait wait. She didn't even bother to text you first, but went straight to your mom to ask if it was ok instead of contacting you directly? Yo that's literally fucked.
@ZBennoui @shefoof Oh oh. That's way less of an annoyance, but still. Oooof. I'm still freezing out over her asking if a family member or friend could help you shoot the video. There's nothing that says you had to use the site she gave you. Hell you probably could have shot it on your phone and sent it to her, and I imagine it would have been ok. VO tells you if you're in frame.
@jdking92 @ZBennoui @shefoof She didn't ask me, my friend got asked first and he messed with the platform or whatever and something was weird on the accessibility side of things. He told her that whatever she wanted done wasn't accessible, my guess was she wanted some sort of video recorded so it could be automatically added to a memory slideshow or something, one of those things where you can't just send a video you have to record through the site or whatever, I don't know, but I didn't see it, and honestly she's lucky she got told no by him and not me, I wish she would have asked if someone could help me, I wouldn't have been nice like my friend was. I'm already over stupid people.
@ZBennoui @shefoof Oh man. yeah I imagine that could have posed a fair few problems. Stupid people legit suck all the balls. I can't stand them at the best of times, and this situation definitely would have made me throw hands and scream horrible things out the window.
@jdking92 @ZBennoui @shefoof I don't care how well-meaning you are when you say some stupid shit like that to me, I don't have to be nice, I don't care if there's this expectation that as a person with a disability I should be kind all the time, I don't live by that expectation and it's not my job to educate the ignorant. It's 2026. The internet exists if you can get past the bullshit, these things aren't hard to find answers to.
@ZBennoui @shefoof I definitely hear that loud and clear. Educating people really is exhausting and it's not our job to do that all the time. Like you said, the internet exists. If folks can't do web searches to get answers to their questions, they have bigger problems to worry about. I'll educate the people who clearly care about this sort of thing and are trying their hardest to be good folks, but the assholes of the world? Naa fuck them.
A critical vulnerability in Google's Fast Pair protocol can allow attackers to hijack Bluetooth audio accessories like wireless headphones and earbuds, track users, and eavesdrop on their conversations.
Hey, just a heads up, Bandcamp just announced they are banning all AI created music from their platform, and I could tell within two seconds of listening that this was created by Suno. I won't give my opinion on the music here, just putting it out there.
This song is currently included as a demo project in Apple's #LogicPro. I'm too young to have used Logic 9 when that was out so I'm not sure about those, but of all the demos that came with Logic Pro X and now 11, this one's my favorite by far. Wonder what Apple will do with Logic 12 coming out about two weeks from now. youtu.be/eTkFpdLogEg
SWING SWING! - https://EllieDixon.lnk.to/InCaseOfEmergencyIDTHE SWING MUSIC VIDEO IS HERE!! ⚾Hope you have a ball with this one ✨I wrote this song when I was...
I got one of those sextortion emails today. I sent it happily on its way too me@rescam.org. click this link to see the conversation as it unfolds or as it doesn't. this one seemed pretty eager to get money and nothing else. replay.rescam.org/?id=ed53334f…
remember, if you get any kind of scam email, forward the email to me@rescam.org. the scammer's time will be wasted by an AI chat bot pretending to be a victem. any time a scammer has to suffer is a good time.
We now have a working SAPI5 version of the Speechify engine that was used on NOAA Weather Radio from 2003 to 2016. Installation and setup instructions are included in the archive. datajake.braillescreen.net/TTS…. The default voice is Tom, however you can also use Jill by editing the voice name in config/SWIttsConfig.xml.
Bri🥰
in reply to Bri🥰 • • •