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The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

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Re: The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

#21

Post by WarmWash »

tuukkao wrote: post #19
WarmWash wrote: post #12

This almost perfectly encapsulates the problems that create friction for new technology. People want/expect the new technology to be an upgraded version of the old technology. "AI is going to make screen readers amazing!" No, that is not what AI is going to do. That is the exact kind of missing the forest for the trees that comes with new tech. AI will be used to act as a sighted person sitting next to the blind pers…

Can you elaborate how an user interface based on conversation is even remotely as efficient as a keyboard-operated screen reader? With a screen reader I can get information out of a web page much quicker than the time it takes me to think how to ”ask” for it. The only advantage with this approach I could see (assuming there would be no hallucinating etc.) is that AI can extract things out of an inaccessible / unfamil…

Then the problem was solved 30 years ago, and you can continue to use it indefinitely.

No one will force a blind person to use a computer that converses in natural english. But even sighted people are likely to move away from dense visually heavy UIs towards natural conversational interface with digital systems. I suspect that given that comes to fruition (unlike us nerds, regular folks hate visual info dense clutter), young blind people won't even perceive much impediment in that area of life.

This isn't far off from CLI vs GUI debate, where CLIs are way faster and more efficient, but regular people overwhelmingly despise them and use GUIs. Ease over efficiency is the goal for them.

Re: The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

#22

Post by lukastyrychtr »

superkuh wrote: post #7

What use is human sounding TTS when your desktop cannot read the contents of windows? As someone with progressive retinal tearing who's used the linux desktop for 20 years I'm terrified. The forcing of the various incompatible waylands by the big linux corps has meant the end of support for screen readers. The only wayland compositor that supports screen readers in linux is GNOME's mutter and they literally only adde…

What? This description makes no sense. Nothing changed with at-spi2, that is X.org/Wayland independent. The only think which got added (and is already suppored by Kde) is a protocol to inform the screen reader about keyboard events, as it previously used the "anyone in my session can read my keyboard" capability of X.org.

Re: The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

#23

Post by pixl97 »

nowittyusername wrote: post #10

I have been working on playing around with over 10 stt systems in last 25 days and its really weird to read this article as my experience is the opposite. Stt models are amazing today. They are stupid fast, sound great and very simple to implement as huggingface spaces code is readily available for any model. Whats funny is that the model he was talking about "supertonic" was exactly the model I would have recommende…

>Also I think he is implementing his models wrong.

This is something I've noticed around a lot of AI related stuff. You really can't take any one article on it as definitive. This, and anything that doesn't publish how they fully implemented it is suspect. That's both for the affirmative and negative findings.

It reminds me a bit of the earlier days of the internet were there was a lot of exploration of ideas occurring, but quite often the implementation and testing of those ideas left much to be desired.

Re: The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

#25

Post by visarga »

I've been using a screen reader Chrome extension for 15 years using the Alex voice on MacOS. Some people find it robotic but I could not replace it yet. I speed it up to 1.4x. When I tried Eloquence voice now it sounded even more robotic, but I can relate to that.

Re: The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

#26

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

miki123211 wrote: post #13
nuc1e0n wrote: post #2

Has anyone considered decompiling eloquence? With something like ghidra or ida pro? Mario 64 was turned back into high level language source code this way.

This wouldn't be easy due to Eloquence's internal architecture. eci.[dll|so|dylib] only contains the low-level platform abstraction layer, things like threads, queues, mutexes etc, as well as utility classes for .ini file handling and such. It then loads a language module (from a path specified in eci.ini). The actual speech stack is statically linked separately into each language module (possibly with modifications,…

I'm bullish on LLMs being able to help with this kind of reverse engineering effort, if not current models then in a few more years. I've had conversations with people where they managed to get Claude to help reverse engineer old weird binaries with very little input. I wouldn't hype it up as being a magical tool that'll definitely work, but it can't hurt to try.

Re: The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

#27

Post by layer8 »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #3

This surprises me: "These modern systems are developed to sound human, natural, and conversational. Unfortunately this seems to come at the expense of accuracy. In my testing, both models had a tendency to skip words, read numbers incorrectly, chop off short utterances, and ignore prosody hints from text punctuation. "

Why does it surprise you?

Re: The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

#28

Post by layer8 »

miki123211 wrote: post #14
46493168 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft. A new version hasn’t been released because Microsoft, like most companies, don’t take accessibility seriously. The original Eloquence TTS was developed as ETI-Eloquence. ScanSoft acquired speech recognition company SpeechWorks in 2003, and in October 2005, ScanSoft merged with Nuance Communications, with the combined company adopting the Nuance name. Currently, Code Factory distributes ETI Eloquence for Wi…

This is missing large parts of the story. Microsoft only bought the speech recognition / med tech parts of nuance, everything else, notably the Vocalizer speech stack (and likely also Eloquence) was spun off as Cerence. We know that somebody still has source code for Eloquence somewhere, as Apple licenses it and compiles it natively for aarch64 (yes I've looked at those dylibs, no there's no emulation). Not sure why…

> We know that somebody still has source code for Eloquence somewhere, as Apple licenses it and compiles it natively for aarch64 (yes I've looked at those dylibs, no there's no emulation).

It’s not impossible that Apple might have transpiled the x86 machine code.

Re: The state of modern AI text to speech systems for screen reader users

#29

Post by 46493168 »

miki123211 wrote: post #14
46493168 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft. A new version hasn’t been released because Microsoft, like most companies, don’t take accessibility seriously. The original Eloquence TTS was developed as ETI-Eloquence. ScanSoft acquired speech recognition company SpeechWorks in 2003, and in October 2005, ScanSoft merged with Nuance Communications, with the combined company adopting the Nuance name. Currently, Code Factory distributes ETI Eloquence for Wi…

This is missing large parts of the story. Microsoft only bought the speech recognition / med tech parts of nuance, everything else, notably the Vocalizer speech stack (and likely also Eloquence) was spun off as Cerence. We know that somebody still has source code for Eloquence somewhere, as Apple licenses it and compiles it natively for aarch64 (yes I've looked at those dylibs, no there's no emulation). Not sure why…

Good catch, you're right. I found this open letter that mentions that Cerence owns Eloquence [0]. That also seems to be confirmed by the update to the letter.

[0]https://openletter.earth/to-cerence-inc-hims-inc-hims-intern...

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