@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.
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.
