Over the past year, I've been experimenting with neural text to speech in various forms. I have done hours of experimentation and research, training models and getting varying results along the way. Some of you may have heard of Piper, an open source synthesizer and add on for NVDA that can be trained by anyone. It is currently in active development, and I have been there from the beginning, testing and evaluating the various versions. For years, I have had a goal to create a high-quality voice that is truly usable by a screen reader user, and yesterday I managed to achieve this. I'm really excited to share Alba, a female Scottish English voice. I'm considering this a beta phase, and I'm looking for feedback to make improvements as needed. Please note that you will most likely get an error upon installation, however the voice should still show up to NVDA, and I'm working on fixing this as soon as possible.
Link to Piper: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/tree/v0.1.0
Link to addon: https://github.com/mush42/piper-nvda?ref=building.open-home.io
Link to Alba: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wZHuIll6aEEFd4OdLBCVcxF7bd3PbQTB/view?usp=share_link #TTS #AI #ScreenReader #Piper
@ZBennoui This doesn’t seem to run on Apple Silicon (probably due to missing SIMD extensions, which are still covered by Intel patents I believe.)
@ZBennoui This is for Piper running on native Apple Silicon (compiled for ARM), not for emulating X86
@miki I'm a little confused. What are you trying to do?
@ZBennoui I’m running NVDA on Windows in a virtual machine, Parallels.
@miki Oh I understand now. I have an m1 pro Mac here, however I use my intel machine to test as there is no synth driver for VoiceOver yet. I'm not really sure how to help unfortunately.
@ZBennoui I mainly posted this in case others wanted to know, not to complain. It makes your NVDA go completely silent, so I think it’s worth knowing about