Here's another really cool recent discovery. The "phonetic punctuation" NVDA addon has been around for a while, and it used to do one thing, substitute various symbols (or more technically any regular expression you put in), with sounds. But, as I discovered accidentally while looking for something in the addon store, it was quietly updated in December, now renamed "Earcons and Speech Rules." And this new version is a huge game changer at least for me. If you ever used the JAWS speech and sounds manager to its fullest this addon is now basically an equivllent. You can give any control type or state a sound, and unlike something like unspoken, these sounds are played in sync with the speech and the addon has no problem dealing with something like multiple links on a line. It also allows you to have NVDA indicate various formatting attributes, like bold, italic and heading levels, with either pitch/speed/volume changes or sounds. The very latest version of this addon comes with built-in heading level sounds that I contributed, and in an upcoming version it will also support assigning spelling errors as a formatting attribute. github.com/mltony/nvda-phoneti…
Phonetic punctuation is an NVDA add-on that allows to convert punctuation signs into audio icons. It can also convert any regular expressions into audio icons. - mltony/nvda-phonetic-punctuation
This seems like it will be neat. I just have to figure out how to turn off the punctuation sounds. I didn't realize just how detailed things would be, so when the pitch went up for an all-caps word, then there were hand claps for quotes, it was all rather startling. I'll also have to see if I can find why I hear "H2" for headings in addition to the sounds.
@alexhall The addon adds its own category to NVDA's settings. All the punctuation rules are under the "text regular expressions", you can simply move down the list and hit Alt+T on each to turn it off. The same goes for the h2 thing, that's under the "numeric formatting" category. That's a leftover from when it didn't support sounds for that and apparently wasn't taken out of the default configuration
@masonasons @jscholes I guess it's because the actual punctuation is technically being stripped. I have all the regex rules off and the punctuation is preserved when speech history copies it.
Not sure how to fix it to be honest. Probably by waiting for the new extension points to land in a stable version of NVDA and updating SH to use those instead of monkey patching. @masonasons
@masonasons @jscholes There is also a way to temporarily turn all the rules off, which is NVDA+Alt+P by default which might be a workaround. And on the flipside I love how the speech history still includes all of the sounds and pitch changes which I didn't expect.
@x0 Yeah the author tried to get to get it fixed, sent a PR even but it wasn't aproved. Perhaps now that the old audio support is on its way out and more people heard of this addon we can get it fixed.
We still need to maintain compatibbility with 2024 though, 2025 is going to be a hard sell even more than usual for breaking every synth add-on ever in what seems like a backward incompatible manner. All the conditionals. It's going to be strange.
@KaraLG84 Ditto, I have 2 drivers and they both behave differently. IBM TTS works, while the latest version of Eloquence threshhold doesn't crash but also doesn't change the rate either.
bringing this thread up again because I just tried the earcons add-on again: Which version of the Eloquence DLLs are you using? I'd really like to get to the bottom of why this crashes NVDA, and it's only IBMTTS that it does it with.
@KaraLG84 I had to remove it. It absolutely broke in chrome, couldn't move in any direction on most pages at all. Very few of the shortcut keys did anything.
@KaraLG84 I've no idea. I don't have any other addons that mess with browsers other than Tyler's thing that speeds up aria events, but that shouldn't cause as many issues as this did.
@KaraLG84 Wait you actually got it to work with IBMTTS? But I thought the indexing in there made it unreliable? At least timing wise. I suppose changing rate and whatnot is just a speech sequence alteration which hasn't anything to do with indexing, but sound playback definitely is. Is it capable of playing sounds without interrupting speech? Cause if it tries to interrupt by inserting the sound in a pause I doubt that works even still. Tony even tried a PR but it behaved weirdly with spelling and introduced more latency to the driver as a whole. I need to see if WASAPI fixed the crackles and whatnot, because if it did I'm just going to strip the damn index buffering and bring back the x0_personal versions if I have to.
@x0 @KaraLG84 Timing is slightly off, yeah, but it does work. Though this addon was the reason I also installed Eloq threshhold even though there's things I don't like about it like how it's randomly saving my voice settings as British English for no reason.
@x0 @KaraLG84 Somewhat unrelated, how spossible would it be to put in a switch that is simliar to unspoken in that , yes I want you to play sounds and such, but I also want you to not alter what you normally would speak? I.E. play the heading sound, while at the same time not midifying how headings are normally spoken, I.E. keep the role announcements? There are practical situations in which having your cake and eating it too proves useful.
@x0 @KaraLG84 Not exactly, because it would still leave the role announcements out of the loop. Unspoken allowed you to have sounds while preserving traditional role announcements.
@pvagner There is a verbose mode you can turn on which I think does what you want. I don’t remember what the default key stroke is, but yeah, I think it’s possible.
@pvagner It doesn't fully disable role suppression, wonder how possible it would be to backport the method Unspoken used to do role sounds while keeping the speech queues. Maybe provide multiprong rule support?
Sounds very cool. For me one of the major advantages of Unspoken is suppressing the role names though, do you know if that's possible as well? It just makes moving around quicker.
It's really a cool addin, but I can't figure out how and what to turn off to make it behave the way I want it too. Right now it's just too verbose for me.
@TSchulte Go into NVDA's settings and look for the earcons and speech rules category, you can turn the sounds you want off from here or add new ones. I agree the default configuration is very noisy, I turned basically all of the punctuation sounds off
I'd like to create #wireguard tunnel between two natted machines. I'm fine with using an intermediate third machine for IP addresses and ports discovery. The idea outlined in this article sounds verry appealing to me. However I'm wondering is there something that is developed further beyond a proof of concept I might look at instead? I know there is #tailscale. That sounds too much for me unfortunatelly as I do need to register with them and similar. Thus I'm exploring if there is something I can self host.
My grandmother's 90th birthday present ready: a chronicle of her family all the way to the late 16th century. If you ever want something like that (in the Czech Republic), I can only recommend @rodokmeny/ @margo.
Je možno nějak (naprosto zhruba) odhadnout, kolik stojí zakázka takového nějakého rozsahu? Tohle vypadá mnohem hodnotněji (ale také náročněji/dráž) než všechny ukázky typických služeb "vyrobíme vám rodokmen", které jsem kde viděl. @sesivany @rodokmeny
@mormegil Tato konkrétní zakázka stála asi 36.000,- ale záleží na počtu dochovaných archiválií a matričních zápisů. Raději každému říkám ať počítá s cenou kolem 45.000,- Kč. Více najdete na rodokmen.info
@mormegil Ještě bych doplnil, že v té zakázce nebylo jen zpracování rodokmenu a kroniky tohoto rodu, ale doplňování rodokmenu z dalších dvou linií, které už jsem měl sám rozpracované a měl jsem individuální požadavky (pomoct tam, kde jsem se sám zasekl), takže moje zakázka nebyla úplně typická. Původně jsem si říkal, jestli to tak neudělat se vším, ale ta zpracovaná kronika má opravdu přidanou hodnotu. Nejsou to jen suchá fakta, ale paní @margo to dokáže velmi pěkně zasadit do historických reálií a dějinných událostí a napsat k tomu opravdu pěkné povídání. Babička dárek ještě nedostala, ale mamka je z něj nadšená.
I am running a Bookwyrm instance, which receives a post request to /inbox about twice a minute, from mastodon.sdf.org. The user it is posted as no longer exists, and every time this happens, SDF returns a 404, which is then logged here. Any idea what is going on? The two IP addresses the requests come from belong to mastodon.sdf.org, so I am assuming they are not forged.
This one is special to me, partly because it took some time to cook 😅 , partly because I talk a bit about #ux (which is not my main field), and partly because it features an experiment: after talking about #webpush and #pwa with #django, I'm asking my dear readers (you 😉) to visit a small demo website and tell me how it went!
You can give feedback here, or on Lemmy, Lobsters, etc. I'll update the post with the links!
Today I want to talk to you about a combination of technologies that I don’t see often implemented, yet I wonder why: Web Push Notifications and Progressive Web Apps.
Jenny had married Roger, a man much older than her. Concerned about his health, she decided they should have separate bedrooms after the wedding to ensure he didn’t over-exert himself.
That night, after the celebrations, Jenny got ready for bed. Soon, there was a knock at her door. It was Roger, her 85-year-old groom, ready for some romantic time together.
They enjoyed their time, and Roger left. Jenny was about to fall asleep when she heard another knock. To her surprise, it was Roger again, full of energy. They spent more time together, and he left once more.
Just as she settled in, there was yet another knock. Roger, as lively as ever, was back for a third round. Jenny laughed and went along with it again.
Afterward, she looked at Roger in amazement. "I’m so impressed!" she said. "At your age, you’ve got more stamina than men a third your age. You’re incredible!"
Roger paused, looking puzzled. "Wait," he said. "You mean I’ve been here before?"
Android 16 deprecates accessibility announcements, characterized by the use of announceForAccessibility or the dispatch of TYPE_ANNOUNCEMENT accessibility events. These can create inconsistent user experiences for users of TalkBack and Android's screen reader, and alternatives better serve a broader range of user needs across a variety of Android's assistive technologies. developer.android.com/about/ve…
Myself and my good friend @bumble (who runs a variety of server types on the fediverse), are joining forces to offer #hosting for #GoToSocial servers.
It's early days but we'd be keen to hear from anyone who wants to try running their own GoToSocial but doesn't have the skill, want, or equipment to run their own server.
The aim is to simply charge for running costs for the server. We will not take any costs from this (unless we end up with hundreds of them!). We anticipate a basic instance for one user (or a small handful) will be 5 euros per month and the charge is month to month. You pay each month in advance, and can cancel any time.
All you need is a domain name (or a sub-domain of your existing domain). We can help with this, or help you buy one for a few dollars/euros. We will handle all admin of the server.
Initially we are only looking for a few people to participate. If you are interested send me a direct message.
Found this Windows virtual display driver which basically acts like the software equivalent of a dummy plug. This solves a very specific problem for me: If I close my laptop lid and try to take screenshots or share my screen, they show up in 480p because Windows apparently defaults to that when no display is connected. This also makes websites render in their mobile layout unless I zoom the page in. The driver goes all the way up to 4k resolution and can actually emulate multiple monitors if you need that for some reason, but I found 4k lagged my poor five-year-old laptop noticeably, so I'm using 1080p now. This also would have been really useful in the days when screen readers didn't have screen curtain, but now they do. When looking through the assets, make sure you download the setup instead of the driver, unless you want to manually configure it. github.com/VirtualDisplay/Virt…
Add virtual monitors to your windows 10/11 device! Works with VR, OBS, Sunshine, and/or any desktop sharing software. - VirtualDisplay/Virtual-Display-Driver
🌟 OSCLOUD: Od malého projektu k velké Open-source komunitě! 🌟
Začali jsme jako malý projekt na podporu Open-source aplikací, dnes máme: ✅ Dva Mastodon servery ✅ PixelFed s 1000+ uživateli ✅ PeerTube VHSKY pro videa ...a další! 💻 A teď s radostí představujeme nový web 👉 web.oscloud.cz/ Za jeho podobou stojí @cynik_obecny – díky za skvělou práci! 🙌 Připojte se a objevte svět Open-source – svoboda, soukromí a bezpečnost u nás vždy na prvním místě!
And another recommendation while I'm here, this one for basically every platform, I kept hearing @joplinapp brought up in discussionss of best note taking apps, and I finally sat down to try it out after they advertised accessibility improvements in the latest update and yeah I'm loving it so far. Everything has hotkeys, the controls read very well including the quick search/command palette, you have a markdown preview right next to the note you're working on, it has a spell checker, you can attach files to your notes, and everything syncs encrypted to any device using pretty much whatever you want, it supports everything from syncing through a local directory on your filesystem which is only on the desktop version, to dropbox/onedrive/webdav or their own cloud solution. It's an app with a simple and very accessible interface with a lot of features
That's right! Finally a good working notes app for Windows and iOS at the same time. From myself, I'll add that the browser plug-in that allows you to save the content of articles for later also works great, from my tests it does very well with pulling up entire articles, and if that wasn't enough for someone, they can always save the entire page as markdown or HTML.
I love open source, and I want young people to know there’s a career path outside of #FAANG. Open source can be financially sustainable—it just gets super hard if one of your key goals is making your investors even richer. #Conversations_im is about the same age as #Matrix. I never took VC funding, and I’m doing fine.
Spent the last 6 hours trying to get a hello world equivalent gui window with a button on rust under windows.
This task which one might think is simple ended up taking literal hours and still hasn't been achieved because: the tutorials for gtk on windows and rust suggest putting msys2 bin directory on the path. This causes rust to fail to build correctly because it uses the wrong gcc and linkers. Afterwards I managed it by using the appropriate environment variables. But then I found out the dynamically linked libarries weren't found. I tried getting a way to copy them but it turned out to be too much work so I just moved the executable to the same dir. Only to find out that gtk4 has no accessibility on Windows. Not bad accessibility, not accessibility that needs to be turned on. No. Accessibility. At all. So then I decided to try Qt, which wants me to create an account to get an installer. Absolute no. Got the 1.5gb sources and trying now to get an off-line installer out of it.
To get a fucking window with a button in it.
I don't think it's unreasonable for me to say this state of affairs is complete bullshit, and that most people with a normal level of motivation would have found plenty of opportunities to have given up. I still might.
(Not using NWG because tying the data to the GUI elements is non-trivial, it seems to require copying a lot and using twice the memory.)
I gave it a quick look and it seems it has no accessibility support. This means it doesn't exist. I can't exactly use a GUI toolkit if I can't navigate the programs I produce. Thanks for the suggestion.
Alright, I've checked out egui, through eframe, and slint. Both work for some values of work. Unfortunately eframe is quite limited in terms of the widegts it offers, and the direct mode seems a little unsuited to my application idea. Slint fits better, but it's still missing a lot of widegts I need, such as menu bars.
Yes, I was looking at that as well through eframe, but it doesn't seem to support some of the widget types I need. Slint gets closer but is still missing menus.
I thought @matt's work to renovate the Linux accessibility stack was going to result in some level of GTK accessibility on Windows (because of AccessKit), but I haven't heard any updates about the project in a while. And I could also be completely wrong.
No es mala idea, el problema es que no encuentro librerías para usar WX en Rust que funcionen en Windows, por lo menos en principio. A lo mejor hay algo que no he localizado.
I mean, PyQT kind of sucks on the accessibility side in some places, or at least did the last time I tried. WX makes your app look extremely Windows-like if you run them on the Mac, not to mention its abhorrent and unpythonic style.
I wasn't aware of a11y issues with py-qt. Not so fussed about how things look, much less on the mac, for obvious reasons. But, sure, if someone wants to make multiplatform stuff that looks similar it does get more involved.
Oh, Qt has improved, as far as I know. At least I've used some Qt programs that seemed to be alright. Really disappointed that gtk's accessibility is limited to linux though.
it's not just about how things look visually, even if you're using VO, you get yes/no buttons instead of something like "keep"/"delete", very Windows-like shortcuts etc.
You can probably fix this if you go the extra mile, though.
One program I've seen, although I'm not totally sure what Toolkit it was using, used option+f4 to quit instead of command+q. That's what I mean by "apps looking Windows-like."
Ah yeah, functional issues. I never got along with macs is the thing, so I wouldn't really think of producing software for them. Of course if you can let the library deal with it that's great.
Iced has no accessibility. Thanks for the suggestion of Slint, that might work. Unfortunately up to now windows has the best accessibility around, so that makes it imperative for me to keep using it. Hopefully this changes one day.
Mm, from a quick look at eframe it seems it's quite limited about the sort of widgets it supports, but maybe I need to read more docs. Looking for things like listviews, menu bars, etc.
Gtk .18 will have a11y support on Windows thanks to the Accesskit backend, so, just wait a few weeks or compile it from source? Did not try that on Windows yet, though.
@Lukáš Tyrychtr @modulux GTK 4.18 that is. Still it's a shame #a11y work by @Matt Campbell is not continuing the way it has been envisioned from the start.
@graydon May I recommend FLTK? I can’t say I’ve completely mastered it, but it seemed easier to get a basic GUI working than what you have suffered with.
I'm a bit nervous about the fact it uses an external crate for a11y, so it's not on by default, and it says some widgets have a11y support, so it's not clear if all of them do. Also can one do list views? I haven't seen them on the list of widgets.
PS Still trying to build Qt, got failures due to: lack of ATL, mismatch in architecture, and now some weird openssl link failure.
I've been trying FLTK after running out of other options. I can see why you recommended it, the building situation is so much easier, just cargo add with the bundle feature and it's done.
Unfortunately the accessibility implementation isn't good. I've only given a quick look, but the example provided already doesn't work well. Specifically, the screen reader re-reads every time an input field is changed, so it reads the entire input whenever a new character is entered.
However if one day the accessibility situation improves I will definitely look into it again. It seems much easier to deploy.
Made this disco track in Ableton last night. I wanted to try making something exclusively using samples, but also edit them to make them unique to me. I think it turned out sounding great, and Ableton made chopping and resequencing parts extremely easy and fun. Sorry no alt text for this one, for some reason I'm not able to enter it on the web, so I'll put it here.
A disco track in F Major with punchy drums and heavily processed samples.
Hi everyone! Thought I'd resend my introduction after not being active for who knows how long. And as far as I'm aware, on this server I haven't even introduced myself yet. I'm Nikolett from Hungary. I used to have an account on Mastodon, but I wasn't that interested in the whole Fediverse thing back then. Now I'm 22 years old. I'm Hungarian, but I'm very interested in slavic languages and culture. I speak Russian fluently, as well as Polish, but in the latter I'm a beginner. I studied Russian at university for 4 years, and now I'm an official translator. I am very interested in music: I play piano, as well as a little guitar, and sing in my freetime. I love animals; I have a black cat who has been part of my life for 12 years. I like technology and IT. I want to learn programming as a hobby, but no one is teaching me yet. I also really like retro, old things. I also like to play computer games, although I have a hard time losing. 😊 I usually smile because it's important for me to connect with people and for everyone to feel comfortable talking to me. What I don't think is worth hiding is that I am blind. But that fact doesn't stop me from doing almost everything I set my mind to. I'm just happy to be here! 😊
So let me get this straight: First, it was Elon. Now, it is Mark. Two guys are removing all moderation rules on social media. And are people asking another billionaire to build alternative social media? Do you even hear yourself? That is not going to fix anything. Maybe we should go back to the days of blogs, mailing lists, individual forums, and RSS feeds and end this madness of centralized social media apart from the federation. I’m just saying
Say I consider "Audacity" to be a frustrating program to use.
Is there a Linux audio recording program which is a little more stripped down than Audacity? Like say some sort of "voice memo" program that lets me just record voice clips and recover the wavs. Export as MP3 a bonus but not required.
Super ultra bonus points if it's in either the GNOME Software repository or on Flathub.
I remember using arecord in bash scripts to do this sort of thing. Might be worth a tinker. Pretty sure I had rec as a command which I just ctrl+c'd to send sigint when I was done and boom. You're capturing audio from your shell by typing rec.
Earlier today took the first ride in the #Waymo driverless car and here is a quick recording of how the music sounds on the car speakers. I also make a few comments about some of the things the Waymo app allows me to do. But the experience is really quite accessible and simply amazing! It is hard to believe we are so close to the driverless future! :)
How's the experience finding the car if you're travelling independently? That's my biggest concern with autotaxis. I can often get the driver to shout out or help in crowded environments with Uber or Lyft.
@FreakyFwoof There are issues like in-car controls such as door locks or emergency situations that couldn't be controled by the passenger that also needed to be worked on. I'm not sure if anything got done by the org.
@ppatel @FreakyFwoof A lot of the things can be controlled from the app. you can eeven ask the card to pull over. There is a communication line with the help center where they can take control over the car functions. You can ask the car to play a sound to help you locate it. There is still an issue of the car not stopping right next to you, but the app does provide an accessibility toggel where you can ask Waymo to stop as close as possible. (1/2)
In the ride I took yesterday the car stopped literally few paces away. You can lock and unlock the car from the app. It's leaps from what it was just a few years ago. (2/2)
good to hear you had a good experience, and that the app is better than years back. I did hear of a recent story where one got stuck in a parking lot, and kept going around and around for several minutes.
yep, though it took the customer service reps a few minutes to actually get it to stop. they couldn't gain access at first, or so the report I saw said. the passenger was getting a bit nervous, from the video he posted.
how the heck do you manage not to hit all the other cars on the road? I’m not even being a judgmental jerk here. I am genuinely curious. If this is something that could prove viable in the future, I don’t want to get smashed because the car isn’t paying attention and I can’t.
Příští týden budeme v rámci @openalt srazu zkoušet na Vhsky.cz první veřejný live stream. A obsahem nebude nic jiného než přednáška o #PeerTube a Vhsky.cz.
So I've seen this talked about here a bit, but I wanted to give more context on Kokoro TTS. This model was open sourced back on December 25, and was trained almost entirely on synthetic data taken from Eleven Labs and Open AI. Legality aside, the quality speaks for itself. This is an 82 million parameter model, which is very small by today's standards, but that means it's incredibly fast even on CPU.
The main dev responsible for training seems to know much more than the average open source enthusiast about how to make high-quality TTS, and I think the results speak for themselves. The model is under very active development and still quite young, more data is currently being collected, and a new version will be trained and released likely in the coming months. Their Discord is quite active, and I'm over there as well if you'd like to join. I think this has the potential to be a great option for blind screen reader users, who may not be able to afford something like Vocalizer on Windows, but we're not quite there just yet in terms of performance.
Here is a demo of one of the voices reading about Android.
that voice somehow oddly reminds me of Vocalizer Zoe. Hopefully some day we'll be able to fine-tune our own model from theirs with our voice training data, will probably jump more onboard with it once we get a notebook / more tools and instructions on doing so. But I'm glad to know others are making them aware of this potential as it would be a shame to let an engine like that go to waste.
@Tamasg This was already brought up and the model is just a fine tune of Style TTS2, which can already be trained. There is no benefit to additional fine-tuning on this model as it was almost exclusively trained on synthetic data, so they recommend that if you would like to make your own voices, you should fine-tune the base STTS2 instead.
ooh, interesting, Style TTS I haven't heard of. Looks like they do have a way to train through notebooks (github.com/yl4579/StyleTTS2/di…) - but that means it might be easier to get an NVDA driver for that specifically rather than this model subset? not sure.
I'm currently learning how to train a custom StyleTTS2 model from scratch. I'm very new to this and thanks to this amazing project and its community, I've already gained a considerable amount of kn...
@Tamasg Yeah. STTS came out last year, and at the time it was competitive with the more recent transformer based commercial models, such as 11 labs. I'm not sure how it's held up or how development has been proceeding, I have not tried fine-tuning that model yet myself as it looked quite hard initially.
@Tamasg The main advantage with something like style TTS is that you can give it data from say an audiobook, and the model will have a much easier time really understanding the intonation patterns and expression in the speech as opposed to a more simple architecture, such as what's used by Piper.
yeah, I did partially wonder that - one limitation we have with screen reader voices is not just that it's a lot of small speech chunks, but we can't feed it text ahead to help the model sound more natural when expressing it, which could still cause a disjointing in speech patterns if it's not able to change punctuation as dynamically as in a full text passage.
@Tamasg that's a great point and something I haven't really considered. I wonder if that's part of the reason for the hesitation on the part of a lot of screen reader companies to switch over to neural options, especially the more recent transformer based approaches that really require proper sentence or paragraph level context in order to sound natural.
would be interesting if you tried to do a sample inference of chunks that way for a simple dialog flow - but you would need to manually split as though it's indexing by the screen reader. For NVDA I've noticed this may be 2-4 chunks per flow: Dialog name and dialog role (1), body text (2), Focused item (3), additional state to that first-focused item such as collapsed (4). So you'd need to inference a passage with smaller splits like that to truly know, then merge all wavs into one single file xD
@Tamas G @Zach Bennoui My use case is training from scratch as I'd like to try creating a better sounding slovak voice. Do I understand correctly that kokoro is adaptation of style2 specifically for english?
I would love to know how to train one of these and make a cool-sounding Bulgarian voice. IF it's really lighter than what I assume we have to our disposal as far as voices go, the heavy stuff. Because even my AMD processors don't take kindly to however our neural engine crap new voices are made. Now that'll be something to experiment with. :D
@Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 I hope you don't mind me being so curious. I am learning slowly and working on these things even slower but I have already helped to train slovak piper voice. The result was not that awfull hover it was not great either. So for a few months I am now working on improving espeak phonemization rules for slovak language trying to make sure all the language specific features are respected as much as possible even before training. I know at least piper and optispeech are using espeak for phonemization under the hood. These days another piper training of slovak voice with these improvements is running over here and it turns out it's sounding much better in terms of pronounciation. However only time will tell us if people will like it though. All this work is based off of previous work we were doing with friends while making slovak voices for RHVoice TTS. So we have text prompts and high quality voice recordings for slovak.
And now those questions: Apart of the robotic sounding voice, How do you like bulgarian espeak pronounciation? Is it similar in complexity to russian? I can't speak nor understand russian, however I do know russian espeak rules include a huge list of exceptions and russian speaking people don't still like it that much. Do you have high quality bulgarian recordings of single speaker or do you know of a public data set that may include such a recordings?
Hmm, other than the Espeak R as pronounciation being weird and throaty instead of the rolling r that we all are familiar with, I haven't had other issues.
@Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 I find it much more work to record a high quality sound recordings of your voice. For slovak my friends managed to record more than 3000 sentences or short phrases. Nabucasa have published some of the audio data they were using to train their piper voices and I think they are at least 1000 recordings of single speaker per language dataset. If you are considering to do this work, perhaps try to research how to train on a different language / single speaker audio data set so you will get familiar with the process and then you can evaluate if you can do it on your own or with help of your friends and similar. Perhaps I am missremembering but I guess you might also be able to understand hungarian and there are some recordings for hungarian you might be able to experiment with if you are not going to learn with english data.
Oh, sure sounds like a lot of work. Surely, if I had no job, I could do it, seems time-consuming. And I understand basic phrases, I am learning, but slowly. I took Spanish as a second language in university, and have not graduated do to difficulties with the teachers and a lot of fighting for accessibility. It sucks. And also the fact Spanish isn't coming to my intuition like, say English, is also not nice. But I can speak both English and Bulgarian quite fluently.
@Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 My first attempt at verry small TTS related contribution was almost 15 years ago. At that time Jonathan Duddington, the original eSpeak author created a slovak voice for eSpeak as a reply to my request. At that time I have tried to contributed some dictionary rules so slovak voice for eSpeak started to be usefull. That made me happy and for years I was just using eSpeak on all my devices. Then sometime at the end of 2022 I have found out group of talented people have created great polish voices for the RHVoice TTS. I was wondering how talented polish guys were able to accomplish that and I have started looking around, asked a lot of friends and I was still unable to get something usefull done. Sometime in early 2023 I got in contact with @Zvonimir Stanecic who started working on czech voice for RHVoice. Under his stewardship I was able to learn how to train RHVoice and how to write language rules for RHVoice. My friend ondro shared our vision of better sounding slovak voice and thanks to his talent as a sound engineer as well as a radio speaker here in slovakia he managed to prepare really very high quality audio recordings we are now using in all these experiments. It took us some three or four weeks of very intensive daily work during april and may of 2023 to prepare a first beta version of the slovak voice. When it became evident we haven't wasted our times and our prototype voice started sounding usefull, more close friends have joined us by providing their feetback. Sometime in july 2023 again with @Zvonimir Stanecic leading the team we were able to release first slovak male voice for #RHVoice. In 2024 two more friends have joined the team, managed to record enough high quality audio recordings to train a female voice. So now we do have two slovak voices for RHVoice. During 2024 except of training the female voice we were slowly being improving graphemes to phonemes translation improving the slovak language support for RHVoice. At that time we have realized there are other even better sounding TTS engines out there and wanted to use our recordings for training those. And now the circle is closing we have found out we need to improve eSpeak phonemizer with the experience we have earned during improving RHVoice slovak language support. It took us some 6 months of interupted work to port new RHVoice specific language support back to eSpeak. We even haven't managed to made these available to public yet. We are now experimenting training piper and trying to improve RHVoice even further. So while I can't really understand and speak other languages, I might be able to try answering some of your questions either alone or in cooperation with other guys helping within this team and if you are passionate enough I think it's very likelly you will be able to achieve great result. Again let me repeat @Zvonimir Stanecic is the number one language expert leading teams working on czech, hungarian, croatian, serbian, slovak and other languages support for RHVoice. I think @Cleverson you might find this story of mine and my friends inspiring too.
@pvagner @tardis @asael thanks for this testimonial. I actually prefer RHVoice's pronounciation in Portuguese over ESpeak. If it is OK, I believe I can make some RHVoice recordings yes.
@Cleverson Hopefully I am not that rude by asking this. Feel free to ignore if you think it's not appropriate. Since you were involved with brazilian portuguese voice, do you by any chance have access to the prompts and recordings that were used to train brazilian portuguese voice for RHVoice? If you would be allowed to reuse these you might be able to use that data to train other engines such as piper.
@pvagner Yes, I have access to them all, but you are right that I would need to ask the person to grant me authorization to use them. Since I'm not sure I'll get it, I'm wondering whether Eloquence in Portuguese would be OK.
@Cleverson Well I see recording eloquence or any other voice that is still being offered commercially as a shady practice. Still if you would like to do it for learning the process of training or simply for fun, no one can stop you from doing that. I assumed we are looking to train as natural sounding voice as possible.
@pvagner OK, that's because ESpeak sounds too artificial in Portuguese, though there are people who like it, due to it being inteligible at fast speeds. In any case, I'll try contacting the person who recorded the speeches for RHVoice.
@Cleverson I am not sure I have explained this thing very well so I'll try again in a different words. Each engine I've worked with so far does at least two stages with the text it's asked to speak. First it transforms all the written letters into its internal representation of individual sounds aka phonemes. within this part none of the audio data is involved at all and it does not matter if we do have formant synthesis similar to eSpeak, HTK based synthesis similar to RHVoice it's just we have kind of dissassembled the text phrases into sounds and Written that as a code. The engine then uses this data for producing speech according to the trained model. So while I'm saying we need espeak while training piper or optispeech, I mean we will be using its phonemizer regardless of the audio data we will use for training. Real linguists are able to apply knowledge they have acquired from phonology and morphology of the language. It's predicate or at least widelly known so eventhough we are not linguists but are motivated enough we can gradually improve this part and continue tweaking the phonemizer until we like the pronounciation. So the engine wo'wounwon't be learning this part while training. Programming the actual TTS signal processing is much more involved task, I think we can't do it on our own and we defer to the language model. It trains it-self to inherit characteristics like sounding, intonation, inflection and loads of the other properties from the audio recordings we will be using for training our chosen engine.
@pvagner OK, thanks much. I actually like to stody basics of linguistics. If ESpeak's tone won't interfere in the final voice quality, then most of the problem is probably solved. I believe I still have all the written sentences used for RHVoice. Is it OK to take those sentences and record then using ESpeak?
@clv0@cwb.socialeSpeak is being used internally. We need to have ttext prompts and matching audio recordings of the voice which characteristics We wish to hear in the final result. I have mentioned your RHVoice contribution because I assumed it might be easiest for you to get or ask for those. If you are thinking of other high quality recordings they will be fine too I assume.
@pvagner @clv0 interesting that you helped the Slovak voice like that :) great dedication. Around 2009 or so we got Hungarian voice in ESpeak after Jonathan used my recordings to construct the phoneme data, but I must say, Hungarian RH Voice does have the better accent, although eSpeak still is not unpleasant like Vocalizer can be for longer passages so still a win. Since some of the RH Voices are taken from Piper and other open-source data voice quality can be a bit inconsistent but phoneme data is a bit better.
@clv0 @pvagner @tardis and for the small note. I am also still learning and i will have a knowledge to pass very soon, but i will need to systematize it. It is also regarding our RHVoice. I am learning the labelling.xml thing. This low level things which flags the properties of the trained voice, not just the foma code. I am happy that i can worki with other people when it comes to maintaining and developing new languages.
I could find recordings, I would not record off of movies, thing is, people have dialects, so the best you could do with Bulgarian is read texts yourself and record them. Otherwise it becomes real weird. If I only knew how the neural engines were trained, I would provide you the recordings, sadly, they don't give us such info.
@Tamasg Once Sonata has those TTS models, we have in total 4 neural TTS synths in the framework: Those being Piper, OptiSpeech, Melo TTS and that new Kokoro tts system. That could be more than a good option for local AI driven neural TTS. As I said, I hope @mush42 will add this one, a longside MeloTTS, as other neural TTS providers
This confirms my hypothesis that the primary reason open source neural TTS is so bad is lack of good datasets.
For some reason, there are many companies willing to open-source their LLMs, even though they're trained on books3 and other content scraped from the internet, but that isn't happening for tts.
@miki Yes I've had the exact same thought. Using synthetic data for TTS is a relatively new practice, but it seems like it's been working out well for Kokoro so far. If the big companies refuse to make data available then we have to take matters into our own hands, otherwise we will forever be behind the big players in this space
@pvagner Any chance of a Brazilian Portuguese voice? If so, please call me to contribute. I've contributed to Brazilian Portuguese ESpeak and RHVoice, and would be glad to help with another one.
@Cleverson If you like brazilian portuguese espeak pronounciation and can either record or otherwise source good brazilian portuguese text prompts and corresponding audio recordings I can try to help you doing the same thing for brazilian portuguese I am doing for slovak and that is training either piper or optispeech at the moment, perhaps other engines in the future. I am training on my laptop although it takes much more time than doing it on a high performance GPU better suited for that task. Other people including @Zach Bennoui and @Tamas G are training in the cloud as described here: github.com/ZachB100/Piper-Trai…
@pvagner @Tamasg @clv0 Thanks for mentioning my training guide here, it's a little bit out of date, but I'm more than willing to help with any questions you guys may have. I'm very passionate about this stuff and have been heavily invested in open source TTS over the past few years. Unlike you, I have very little experience with some of the older engines such as RH, but would love to eventually learn enough to train a better quality US English voice for them that's a bit more expressive than what they currently offer.
#Slovensko má velký problém: ransomware zašifroval data katastrálního úřadu. Útočníci chtějí obrovskou sumu za jejich obnovu. A teď to nejhorší: úřad nemá žádné použitelné zálohy! zive.aktuality.sk/clanok/b5zVE…
Dear friends, #screenreader users, #blind users and #accessibility professionals in particular. Are you using chat over traditional email as provided by #DeltaChat / #DeltaLab / #ArcaneChat? I like it uses traditional email infrastructure, is federated, supports end to end encryption, rich content including audio / voice messages. I have even recognized @adb has implemented screen reader accessibility specific features into the android app. However I have quickly tried electron based app on linux with orca screen reader, exchanged a few messages back and fort between two of my personal accounts using the DeltaChat app and thunderbird and I haven't found the user experience verry appealing. I can't understand how to effectivelly navigate in the list of conversations and list of messages. Therefore I would be interested to hear a few comments from people knowing this platform better. How accessible is it on different platforms? On the desktop is the electron based app a prefered choice? Also some other questions. For the best experience, do I need a new email address or can I use my existing self-hosted one I have already configured in thunderbird? Ffeel free to point me to a FAQ, some up to date introductory documentation if you think my questions don't make much sense please.
I'm interested in using Delta chat as well, so if you get good answers to this I'd love to hear them too. I know a few people who use them and all I can do is reply to their emails.
The accessibility of the desktop version of Delta Chat is frankly quite terrible right now, I agree. But me and @treefit started working on this a few months back. Expect further improvements in the next months.
@WofWca @treefit @adb Yes, that sounds amazing. I should perhaps retest the app, look at the accessibility improvements you are working on and try to make sure I can get the most of it. Huge thanks for working on it and for the pointers.
@WofWca Looking more it looks to me you are working on some amazing accessibility related improvements. While I was testing a few weeks ago I had issues navigating the lists. hmm, perhaps I need to figure out how to build with this PR and see for my-self if it might be related. github.com/deltachat/deltachat…
Edit: oh, there are more PRs resolving keyboard navigation and accessibility related issues. It's really right about perfect time I have discovered this thing.
@WofWca So I have finally updated to the latest and greatest #deltachat desktop. And I must say I am really impressed. Both lists, list of conversations and list of messages are now keyboard navigable. The hint for the screen reader users is that not all of the screen readers may switch into focus mode automatically so once you do this manually you can enjoy the user experience the way it has been designed. Also there are nice keyboard shortcuts e.g. ctrl+n for jumping into the input box, ctrl+k for search and more. Now I do really need to explore more i.e. what about the encryption. Can I use my existing GPG key or add a subkey or is that handled transparently on the background? I need to figure out if I should create new email for chatting or use my primary email. Still from the accessibility point of view we are really getting something usefull I think.
Note to my-self and other people like me: Read the #deltachat help at delta.chat/en/help it's all perfectly explained there in easy to follow language. It's even translated to various different languages already. The number one answer for me is that there are #deltachat specific so called #chatmail servers suitable for anonymous instant messaging over email. So eventhough I like to self host my emails, I think I'll go with existing #chatmail server at least initially.
What is Delta Chat? Delta Chat is a reliable, decentralized and secure messaging app, available for mobile and desktop platforms. Delta Chat feels like Whatsapp or Telegram but you can also use and...
indeed, these days we recommend newcomers to use chatmail servers first and explore, also with friends, how things go and feel. Once interest is established it may be worth the effort to also run one or two simply be happy with the existing chatmail servers
@delta Some time ago, there was an attempt to help users to migrate from one server to another, like taking the phone number. I guess you know what I mean. Is there something still in the making? Because this would ease a transition from a chatmail server to an own server, for example.
@devSJR If you have mostly or only "green-checkmarked" chats you can reconfigure your e-mail address to another server and then send a message to your contact which should update them. This will not migrate unencrypted or opportunistically encrypted chats, though, which is why we don't prominently recommend it. Another way is to create a new profile, and then add it to all relevant chats and remove the old profile. More cumbersome but also pretty failsafe.
It is possible for #chatmail users to communicate with classic email users who have published their public key.
You just have to do manual chatmail registration, save your login details and private key securely, and use it with something that supports #pgp like #Thunderbird or #Mailvelope.
@WofWca Perhaps making sure parent of those list items has an attribute role="list" or if you are sure everything inside a particular DOM subtree has logical keyboard focus handling perhaps role="application" on encompassing parent element would do the ttrick. However it really has to be considered visely as it makes it more difficult for screen reader users do read parts of the UI that should behave like a document content by lines, by words and similar.
Hello folks I need your help, after a lot of efforts, I am on the final steps of making #ArcaneChat available in #GooglePlay
now they ask to create a "closed testing release" where only some invited testers via their google account email address can participate and install the app before they allow a public release
please write to me in private sending me your google account's email address (gmail I guess) to join as beta-tester, thanks a lot in advance! ♥️🙏
Okay, and today, the Caps-lock behavior is fixed as well. Now, test the thing thoroughly and then upstream all the parts. And, of course, hope that other compositors will adopt this API, even that they might not like DBus so much.
So this looks like a high quality, fast, natural, and open source TTS system in Python. A key candidate for an #NVDA#addon. Unfortunately, I find #nvdasr addon development super confusing. Is there a good template to start from or something? github.com/thewh1teagle/kokoro-onnx
Here's a much longer example of the quality of speech Kokoro TTS generates. I really do think it might be a decent #NVDA addon. The weird pauses are because I'm just giving it a big long string, rather than chunking it like I should. It generates this in real time on CPU, and faster on GPU. The code to generate it is as follows: import soundfile as sf from kokoro_onnx import Kokoro from onnxruntime import InferenceSession
session = InferenceSession("kokoro-v0_19.onnx", providers=["ROCMExecutionProvider", "CPUExecutionProvider"]) kokoro = Kokoro.from_session(session, "voices.json") samples, sample_rate = kokoro.create( "He wasn't sleeping very well, and he knew the people around him noticed, but he didn't know what to do about it. He had quietly gone to Madame Pomfrey, who had regretfully told him that Dreamless Sleep was highly addicting and that while she could give him the occasional dose, it would have to be spread out enough to prevent it from becoming addicting – meaning he could only take it one night out of every two weeks or so. It was one night more of productive sleep than he'd be getting otherwise, so he still did it, but it didn't help the larger issue. He wasn't under the effects of any nightmare-inducing Curses, potions, or other magical ailments, so there was nothing for Madame Pomfrey to do. The nightmares were coming from his own mind, and she was not a Mind-Healer. She'd offered to try and connect Harry with one, but when Harry discovered that it involved having someone else quite literally entering his mind with magic and helping him sort out things like trauma he couldn't. If Harry couldn't even tell Hermione the extent of what he'd suffered at the Dursley's, he wasn't about to let a stranger into his mind to see it. Let alone the 'adventures' of his Hogwarts years. So the nightmares persisted, and with the poor quality of sleep serving as the first domino, everything else slowly began to fall. His grades weren't slipping yet, but he was struggling with the study schedule Hermione had set out for them and doing his homework took more effort, more energy that he didn't have.", voice="af_sarah", speed=1.0, lang="en-us" ) sf.write("audio.wav", samples, sample_rate) print("Created audio.wav")
ha. I know very little about how we could get it compiled right in the add-on. (I know there was a discussion of this earlier so if that build process for onnxruntime into the add-on succeeded, would love some basic copy then.) For anyone wanting to try, I think looking at something like the Brailab driver (which is super minimal and in the end all you're really going to use are the getters and setters for the synth driver, the way you do speech is obviously not at all like Brailab), and then crafting in to open the stream might work. But between the latest family emergency, work at Spotify with the new year / new projects, I'm afraid I'll be swamped for awhile to give it that truly comparitive look. I'd also love to see a test run at how quick it can synthesize speech on slower CPUs especially when that speech is interrupted mid-utterance - how does it handle stopping a stream and loading a new one, is there lots of latancy? A simple py test that just throws lots of speech chunks like that, stops, starts, would give us an idea maybe to then know if it's worth turning into a driver just yet.
Sorry to hear about family emergencies, never nice to deal with. I hope things can be sorted out for the better.
Re slow CPU though, that's where I come in. I am right now even, using an Intel Core I5-3570K from 2012. It runs every synth very well, apart from Piper which it struggles with due to the neural aspect of it. If my machine can run... Whatever you guys end up coming up with (hopefully) then anything else should be a breeze.
I have an even slower one. Yay for countries in the middle of... Well somewhere, and computers from 2009 haha if something can even run on that, I'd be surprised. How's that for a slow processor? It's pretty ancient. The synth sounds nice, yeah, don't like how it reads hashtag, but I guess that's me. There's also something about question marks it clearly missed, but I think it needs to be fed a bigger chunk of text to see if it'll sound better. Otherwise, for the quality, Bleh, either my ears, or something, do not consider it a great quality in the sound terms, but for a TTS, I guess it's good. says the person who daily drives a TTS that came out in 2001. LOL.
I also cannot tell you the full specs. Computer not here, sadly. It has a removable battery though, that gave up a long time ago, then I fell down some stairs while carrying set computer, and the pixels in the screen went poof, and no screen.
@Samuel Proulx I understand @Musharraf has made verry significant progress for example as compared to piper TTS. To me it looks it's much lighter for both training and using trained model even enhancing audio quality and elligibility in the process. This is just my guess but with such an achievement it's fine not to limit it to blind audience exclusivelly. This is how I am seeing #optispeech. However I haven't played with kokoro TTS thus I have asked how much do you like it for example while comparing to something else, perhaps piper TTS if you do know that one.
Alright, a stupid bug squashed, and, at least locally, Orca can receive all key events from Mutter running on Wayland. Now, I only must fix caps-lock handling to work, e. g. now, Orca gets the events as I would want them, but Mutter does not see the caps-lock state changes, so I can not turn it on even if I want.
@IzzyOnDroid has been doing an amazing job getting our repo to over 30% of apps being reproducible. Maintaining a rebuilder takes a lot of constant work. Thank you!
As I've written before:
[...] the ecosystem is constantly moving: old toolchain and dependency bugs get fixed, but new ones keep popping up. [...] Reproducible Builds are not just an item on a checklist [...] It's an ongoing process involving not just upstream app developers, but also maintainers of repositories, clients, and rebuilders; those involved in outreach and writing documentation; developers and maintainers of tooling, toolchains, and dependencies. And often requires a lot of collaborative debugging :)
See also our "Review of 2024 and Outlook for 2025: Reproducible Builds, Security Measures and more":
2024 winkt zum Abschied, 2025 klopft an die Tür: Was haben wir 2024 erreicht, und was sind unsere Pläne und Hoffnungen für 2025? Werft mit uns einen Blick zurück auf die eingeführten Sicherheitsmaßnahmen, auf die Fortschritte bei Reproducible Builds …
🎉 Celebrate 200 years of Braille with us! This week on Double Tap, we’re diving into Braille’s past, present, and future with amazing guests, tech insights, and your feedback. Don’t miss it—daily on AMI-audio, podcast, and YouTube! 💬👩🏫📚 youtube.com/@DoubleTapVideo/vi… #BrailleAt200 #Accessibility #Tech
Get ready to have your tech world rocked every week with Steven Scott and Shaun Preece on Double Tap! These guys are the ultimate duo - mixing humor, passion, and top-notch expertise to keep you in the loop with the latest in assistive tech for blind…
After a short break over the holidays, KDE developer Nate Graham is back with his 'This Week in Plasma' series to highlight the interesting KDE Plasma desktop changes made each week.
As part of the 20th anniversary of the BBS Documentary's release, I've ripped the 3 DVDs that were included in the project and have them hosted at Internet Archive. These ISO files can be played in the VLC player like DVDs, and include all bonus features, subtitles, director's commentary, etc.
The Bulletin Board System: it brought life online. Long before the Internet connected the planet and changed nearly evertying, there was a brave and...
200 years ago, a #Blind French teenager took six little dots and opened up the world of literacy for himself and generations to come. Merci Louis. Without the code that bears your name, I wouldn't have gotten through school or found success at work. I definitely wouldn't love to read as much as I do. #Braille is independence, dignity, resourcefulness, pride. #Braille is beautiful!! Happy #WorldBrailleDay
Ahoj Fediverse! 👋 Tohle oficiální účet české #PeerTube instance 📼 VHSky.cz. Budeme vás tu upozorňovat na nové autory a zajímavá videa. A rádi uslyšíme zpětnou vazbu, co se vám líbí a co byste na VHSky.cz rádi viděli.
The #38C3 presentation about the massive #Volkswagen data leak is over and the leak was as bad as it sounded. 100,000s of cars could be located down to cm precision. Also a lot of metadata that is NOT supposed to be public. Disturbing.
The main takeaway was that the real problem here wasn't the leak itself, but that this data was collected in the first place.
I agree. It's not a good idea to create mountains of very personal data and then pray it never leaks.
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