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Common Voice

commonvoice.mozilla.org

41–50 of 82 posts

Re: Common Voice

#41
post #34
post #5

FF's TTS is an important project for anyone who wants a trivial to use text-to-speech system. It's built into the browser so you can just run wss = window.speechSynthesis; for (let i = 0; i

On macOS, it's say "enter text here" To pick a different voice: say -v Fred "enter text here" To list voices: say -v "?" (The quoting is necessary to prevent ZSH from interpreting the question mark as a glob.) I hear Firefox's TTL is important, yet prior to your comment I didn't even know it existed. This sort of stuff should be more discoverable, and have a more accessible (ahem) API.

It's part of the web apis, it's not just firefox. Chrome and Safari have supported it since 2013/2014.

Re: Common Voice

#42
post #31

I submitted a request for Norwegian Bokmål, and realised a complication which I'm sure must affect other languages too: Norway has two separate official languages. They are unusually close - one is relatively close to Danish, and the other started as a collection of dialects, but technically they are written languages, especially Bokmål which basically means "book language". I'm unusual in that I speak close to "pure…

Are you autistic? I ask because this is HN where lots of people are, and choosing to speak the literary norm in countries with diglossia is often associated with autism. For example, foreigners in Finland are urged to quickly get to grips with puhekieli (spoken Finnish) because speaking kirjakieli (the literary norm) in everyday contexts, or writing it in chats, is “something only autistic people do”.

Re: Common Voice

#43
Why then is the text2speech in reader mode (which other than that is excellent) on a Linux Firefox so extremely bad? Much worse than Steven Hawkins text2speech.

Re: Common Voice

#44
post #5

FF's TTS is an important project for anyone who wants a trivial to use text-to-speech system. It's built into the browser so you can just run wss = window.speechSynthesis; for (let i = 0; i

Do you know if it’s been extracted into a standalone library? The state of the open source TTS seems to not be great. Presumably the data for a voice is harder to put together than training a speech to text system like whisper.

The voices don't come from the browsers themselves, but from operating systems and their underlying TTS APIs, SAPI on Windows, Speech Dispatcher on Linux and AVSpeechSynthesizer on Apple Devices. If you install a third-party voice compatible with one of these, the browsers will pick that up.

Re: Common Voice

#45
Crowdsourced datasets like this and the ones produced by the OpenAssistant project could easily become the ONLY way to build foundational models if the courts decide that what OpenAI and co are doing is not Fair-Use. I don't think I would call this scenario unlikely, either.

Re: Common Voice

#46
post #5

FF's TTS is an important project for anyone who wants a trivial to use text-to-speech system. It's built into the browser so you can just run wss = window.speechSynthesis; for (let i = 0; i

Is there a handy demo website somewhere to access that?

Re: Common Voice

#47
With recent events in AI and deepfake technology, I would need to see some assurances before I agreed to “donate my voice” to something like this. It seems like the project is for voice recognition, not generation, but it’s not immediately clear.

Re: Common Voice

#48
> Voice datasets also underrepresent: non-English speakers, people of colour, disabled people, women and LGBTQIA+ people.

How does being gay change your voice?

Re: Common Voice

#50
post #31

I submitted a request for Norwegian Bokmål, and realised a complication which I'm sure must affect other languages too: Norway has two separate official languages. They are unusually close - one is relatively close to Danish, and the other started as a collection of dialects, but technically they are written languages, especially Bokmål which basically means "book language". I'm unusual in that I speak close to "pure…

Are you autistic? I ask because this is HN where lots of people are, and choosing to speak the literary norm in countries with diglossia is often associated with autism. For example, foreigners in Finland are urged to quickly get to grips with puhekieli (spoken Finnish) because speaking kirjakieli (the literary norm) in everyday contexts, or writing it in chats, is “something only autistic people do”.

Not to my knowledge, though I may have some traits.

That said, in Norway the literary form is/was spoken on e.g. TV and radio similar to how RP (received pronunciation) is/was spoken on the BBC, more so (in both cases) before than now where dialects are more broadly tolerated. On top of that, in affluent areas of Western Oslo and adjoining affluent areas the dialect sits mostly within what is "allowed" in Bokmål, and actually mostly towards a more conservative end of the allowed range than where I sit, and it's somewhat political, in that more conservative forms of Bokmål historically tended to be associated with social status (or aspirations...).

It's unusual more in that the pockets and social groups where dialects that overlaps fully or almost entirely with Bokmål are fairly small.

My spoken dialect is within that spectrum, exacerbated by reading a lot of older literature at early age that used quite old fashioned forms of Bokmål, and picking up more formal language than many of my peers spoke through that, but I tend to be closer to the more affluent dialect in writing than spoken.

(EDIT: My spoken dialect would probably fit as a somewhat "posh" version of Urban East Norwegian[1] today, with somewhat more conservative word choices in places where contemporary Urban East Norwegian would have deviated from Bokmål in minor ways in the 70's and 80's by being somewhat more "relaxed" in ways that have since been accepted in subsequent adjustments of the rules)

If you heard me alongside my dad there'd be relatively minor differences between our dialects, and I'd probably sound marginally less formal as I adopted some spoken patterns from the more working class area I grew up in outside Oslo, while he at least when younger would be recognisable as having grown up on the Western edges of Oslo.

Beyond that, language has always fascinated me, and I tended to take a certain level of delight in torturing my Norwegian teacher who favoured the other official language - Nynorsk. Nynorsk and Bokmål overlaps very significantly, and more so after recent language reforms which have tended towards allowing more Nynorsk forms of words, or ones closer to them, in Bokmål. Our Norwegian teacher very much wanted us to use those forms (that'd be favouring "sola" over "solen" etc.), and I used to express my distaste for Nynorsk by instead exaggerating my preference for the more conservative Bokmål forms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_East_Norwegian

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