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Subject: Voice file generation and TTS engines

Voice file generation and TTS engines

From: Csapó Endre via rockbox-dev <rockbox-dev_at_cool.haxx.se>
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2016 18:02:42 +0200

Hi Everyone,

I am a very new member on this list.
My name is Endre Csapó, I am from Hungary, I am a blind computer user and programmer, who has since 2011 a Sansa Clip Plus player, used it a little and almost completely abandoned and trashed it due its annoying blind accessibility issues until this week, when I'd found the Rockbox site with this marvelous softice thingie.

I am a Windows user and mostly use and develop for win32, namely for XP or win7 32-bit.

I've installed the Rockbox manually on my Sansa and it works fairly nicely. I may say: the Rockbox resurrected the player for me.

I am here and not on the user mailing list, because I stumbled upon a very nasty problem, which is not a bug, but can cause a lot of headaches for some users and calls for developer intervention.

Using the Rockbox Utility I've tried to generate a hungarian (magyar) voice file.

The RBU had read out the necessary strings from the installation and have begun to produce the .voice file.
And this creation phase has never ended,never had got completed, it always remained at 0 percent.

I have many installed SAPI 5 and SAPI 4 TTS engines for many languages, because I am often producing mp3 audiobooks for language learners. Many in this case means more than 25 engines from various vendors.

There are installed - among others - some hungarian TTS engines too. Some of them are open sapi engines but some are dedicated. In this case the word dedicated means that only some applications or only one of them can use the TTS service of that engine and no others in any case.

The RBU certainly had found such a hungarian TTS engine and tried to attach to it. The TTS vendors very often omit the correct error handling and in any such case it may occur that the "unlicensed" client application cannot detect the rejection from the dedicated TTS engine.

For remedy tis problem, only one sure solution exists: intelligent human intervention.

In the RBU program, on the voice file creation dialog box would be necessary a dropdown combo list with the names of the installed SAPI engines and to let the user choose from them the correct one, because only she/he knows which is open variant and fits for the given language. (A very big bunch of TTS engines even incorrectly reports its talking language for the Windows SAPI manager system, so there is not any guarantee that a program can or will select one correctly upon the language selection solely.)

If these changes will be made to the RBU, I would be pleased to test it and write a test report about it here.

With Regards:

     Endre

 

But the
Received on 2016-06-02

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