Improving the Orca espeak-ng voices

Brainstorm
1

I think the Orca settings page is new? It is pretty useful.

I am happy to see that Orca somewhat works on Wayland, at least in the settings page.

But: KDE is often laughed at for having no clear design and just including everything, and this is especially true with these voices.

eSpeak sounds pretty horrible, and at least I think there is only one voice, with certain tweaks, that sounds fine. For example “Iven”.

Having an accessibility menu filled with… jokes? Does not help. Like “Halflife announcement voice” or “German+Auntie”, or “Linda”?

I couldnt find a single “female” eSpeak Voice" that works.

Do you get telemitry about what voices people use? There should be a preset, for now.

There is Pied to install PiperTTS voices on Linux. I have not tested if this works here.

I heard AcidicLight kinda praise the accuracy of espeak, and I am not sure if more modern, natural sounding voices, sacrifice accuracy over a good sound.

I will experiment with this

2

According to my testing, Pied sounded substantially better and did not seem to have accuracy issues, but it did cause Orca to slow down a lot in certain areas, and it caused certain Orca controls to be disabled (like voice speed or pitch).

3

There’s a KCM that basically just has a button to open the Orca settings, but it’s not what I’d call new.

I’m updating its KCM UI a bit, but I can’t do anything about Orca’s terrible UI and defaults (it’s in Python GTK).

1 Like