gbodley
commented
1 month ago Having used the app a bit more and gained some understanding of it, I think voices should not be mixed in with languages. It seems to me that Languages should be one tab, speech systems a separate tab, and voices a third. I feel at least at the outset there are just too many voices to go through. Some of the Individual voices seem better than others. What I mean by this is that they are more human sounding. Some have more personality in how they read, while others sound more robotic in nature. I suggested above that it might be best to default to what is considered the most natural language system with just 5 or 6 of the most natural with the most personality in the presentation. Another tab or sub area could be "addition voices" Male and female could be categories and perhaps even "robotic" or cartoonish could be other categories. Perhaps there are voices with accents. Say an understandable English speaker with a French accent and so on. Then of course celebrity voices like Obama or Marilyn Monroe. The point is now there is just a huge list of nondescript voices that take a significant amount of time to go through. Some don't have much personality or a rather drab personalities.
This is really a wonderful project with tremendous potential that has long been needed for the Linux Desktop. . I tried to attach an .mp3 file of what I consider to be a clever use of a voice. but .mp3 is not an accepted format. That's completely ridiculous for a program that specifically works generates .mp3 files.
mkiol
I just learned of Speech Note today. Installed it today on Kubuntu 24.04, and contributed a small amount to the project today. It's wonderful compared to everything in the past that I tried on Linux. There are just two things that I would like to see improved at the moment. I would like to be able to adjust the text size in the window. Perhaps I could adjust Plasma in some way to display larger fonts. I haven't done that yet. The other issue is there are massive number of voices, but the descriptions are very cryptic. Perhaps a better secondary descriptive name could be added to each voice along with the ability to hear it even on a website for the project if not in the app itself. I really hope you are able to keep going, because this is a high quality project that has been needed for a very long time. If there was a way to integrated it into LibreOffice it would be fantastic. I hope other programmers will help to move it on to higher levels. Also I don't know of a guide for an optimum configuration. I have a pretty fast computer with significant memory, so it works fine on my machine, but I don't know what is actually best to choose. Is there a best options default with say just 5 of 6 good voices for each language? Maybe just 4? Google translate only has 1 female voice and it lacks personality. The British male voice I'm using with Speech note has much more personality.