31–40 of 50 posts
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…
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…
Gentoo, duvian and all the bsds will keep x11 around until the heat death of the universe. Anyone who doesn't force systemd on their users also doesn't force Wayland. You have plenty of options before windows.
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…
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…
Are you using them at 1000 wpm?
Glooming bottom line: So what's the way forward for blind screen reader users? Sadly, I don't know. Modern text to speech research has little overlap with our requirements. Using Eloquence [32-bit voice last compiled in 2003], the system that many blind people find best, is becoming increasingly untenable. ESpeak uses an odd architecture originally designed for computers in 1995, and has few maintainers. Blastbay Stu…
I found some sample audio from Eloquence. I like this type of voice!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you using them at 1000 wpm?
Supertonic is probably way faster then that, I wouldn't be surprised if measured it would be something like 14k wpm. On my 4090 I was getting about 175x real time while on cpu only it was 55x realtime. I stopped optimizing it but im sure it could be pushed further. Anyways you should check out their repo to test it yourself its crazy what that team accomplished!
Does having it sound "natural" even matter for high-speed reading? I assumed it would be a hindrance at higher speeds because natural variation and randomness in a voice makes it harder to scan the voice (similar to how reading something handwritten tends to be harder than something that has been typeset). At least that's how I always feel whenever I listen to audiobooks that use "natural" voices - I always switch to…
Some of this is surely ssubjective, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only screen reader user with these opinions.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Supertonic is probably way faster then that, I wouldn't be surprised if measured it would be something like 14k wpm. On my 4090 I was getting about 175x real time while on cpu only it was 55x realtime. I stopped optimizing it but im sure it could be pushed further. Anyways you should check out their repo to test it yourself its crazy what that team accomplished!
Audio synthesis speed is one thing, but is the output _intelligible to a human_ at 1,000wpm? That's the sort of thing Eloquence is being used for, according to the article.