2022-01-13 19:47:18

Hey there. I have a suggestion which would significantly improve arabic tts options which will add a free reasonable tts engine to the list. It revolvs around making nvda's espeak support mbrola voices, and also integrating something like mishkal to  diacritize arabic text and send it to espeak/mbrola for synthesis. It's doable on linux, the festival arabic voices repo which I linked in one of my topics links to a tutorial to do it, but it's not there on windows/nvda. If anyone can help me make it easy to integrate a good arabic tts into espeak ng that would be apreciated.

I am a hunter named Grunt. I didn't realize that until now.

2022-01-13 19:48:38

I've made an issue on the espeak gh repo, but I'm also posting here. So I don't actually like to sit ducks when wanting something desprately/very highly, if y'know what I mean

I am a hunter named Grunt. I didn't realize that until now.

2022-01-14 15:51:14

Someone has already tried to do that and it was a real failure by all means, plus Mishkal's quality is terrible even compared to ESpeak's builtin dictionary as far as I'm concerned. I think you've also got to succeed in linking Mbrola's voice with the right phoneme and then recalling them via Mishkal, which will take a lot of time and will make the engine slower and unrealistic to use.
BTW you can try the Arabic MBROLA voices (using ESpeak's default dictionary) along with all other ESpeak voices from this link, although some additional phonemes were used from outside the MBROLA voices' library which made them somehow more artificial than they really are, but I think it was the best and only serious try to integrate these voices for the Arabic language which somehow worked out:
https://odo.lv/Espeak

2022-01-14 18:23:25 (edited by E-t-i-eloquence 2022-01-14 18:25:03)

hey riad old buddy, I know that website, but no, mishkal isn't that bad. Try synthesizing with it using this online tts which supports mishkal, shakkala and shakkelha. Shakkelha is really good, but its only downside is that it ignores diacritics if you type them. Https://arabicspeechcorpus.com

I am a hunter named Grunt. I didn't realize that until now.

2022-01-24 08:53:01

yeah I remember hearing the british english voice as standalone sounding more natural than nvda's mbrola, the mixing of parameters resulting a huge coldish sound

I am a hunter named Grunt. I didn't realize that until now.