Suggestions for Text-to-Speech Engines needed

Using /e/OS Applications
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As you may be aware LineageOS 16 and above does not include PicoTTS.
This mean there is no Text-to-Speech integrated support.
This is now showing up on the /e/ Pie builds we are testing for upgrading our devices.

There is a feature request raised for this on Gitlab

Since this would be a good feature to have in the OS for users with special needs besides those of us who regularly use this feature we are looking at suggestions on best options available that provide good voice quality and has a decent language choice.

Do you have any recommendations for good Text-to-Speech options which can be added to the /e/OS ?

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Unfortunately, I’ve not yet found an open source text-to-speech engine that is equally suitable for multiple languages.

Current exchange of experience here …

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I only found F-Lite TTS and it works for me, cause i only use Osmand voice prompts
But it’s not great, don’t have many language TTSs, and is not mantained and probably won’t be. We needed a good alternative, but until now, there’s none, i guess.

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There’s:

  • MARY, a Text-to-Speech System (MaryTTS) developed by a German public research centre (Open Source): http://mary.dfki.de/index.html
    It currently supports 9 languages (more are in preparation).
  • ESPEAK, Open Source as well. It supports some 20+ languages, but sound quality is considered to be quite robotic: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
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Actually, flite is a fork from Espeak, so they are quite same in many ways…
I think the only way to deal with this is the born of a new FLOSS TTS, and Mozilla and Mycroft are already working on this(Common Voice&voice.mycroft).
You can always contribute to them! No programming skills needed!

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We really need this feature.
Any progress @manoj?
Thanks

:grin:
KaiXin

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Pl check the progress here

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Thanks so much!
As I can see, there is no progress in awhile.

I think this is an important element to have in an OS to provide a complete g-devil free experience!
Please revive the case.
Thanks!

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What about espeak NG? Appears to support Android.
Written in C, GPL-3

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By the way, why isn’t Pico available on /e/ or LineageOS?
It seems this is open source (I found a fork here).
And since it is in the AOSP source tree, isn’t that quite easy for /e/ maintainers to collect it along the way?

MaryTTS seems promising but it is not properly integrated for the Android system. That could be a pet project to integrate, but until it is done, it is not what we expect.

I tried RHVoice and it was quite ok in French. But it feels uncanny that nobody ever talks about it. Do you know if we can trust it? If /e/ team could review it and put it on the store, that would be reassuring.

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