Depending on context, I cycle between espeak-ng with mbrola-en or RHVoice, but even plain espeak shouldn't be discarded.
RHVoice sounds slightly more natural in some cases, but one advantage of espeak-ng is that the text parsing logic is cleaner, by default.
For example, RHVoice likes to spell a lot regular text formatting. One example would be spelling " -- " as dash-dash instead of pausing between sentences. So while text sounds a little more natural, it's actually harder to understand in context unless the text is clean to begin with.
I don't know if speech-dispatcher does this for you, but I'm using a shell script and some regex rules to make the text cleaner for TTS which I don't need when using espeak-ng.
Another tradeoff: espeak-ng with the mbrola doesn't offer all the inflexion customization options you have with the "robotic-sounding" voices. When accelerating speech, these options make a qualitative difference in my experience.
I don't already fully trust the images, audio and videos I take with the phone.
I'm working close to HW and I actively use the camera/picture and videos for future reference and debugging. It's small, fits in your pocket, and the bloody thing can record at 240fps to booth!
Until you realize there's so much post-processing done on the images, video and audio you can't really trust and can't really know if you can turn it all off. The reality is that if you could, you'd realize there's no free lunch. It's a small sensor, and while we had huge improvements in sensor and small lenses, it's still a small sensor.
Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice?
In the end, they're consumer devices. "Does it look good -> yes" is what thrums everything in this market. Expect the worst.
Agree. It boggles my mind how bad and downright hostile windows has become in windows 10/11. I'm supporting a group of ~50 people and most of the time I cannot even give reasons for some of the baffling design decisions and/or frustrating behaviors that I see on a daily basis. I feel like every solution I'm giving is a work-around at best.
And don't forget the new mandated corporate messenger: Teams. After burning messenger, killing skype and linq and all the "for teams" versions, this is their absolute worst yet.
The sad part for me is how you _do_ actually get used to this crap and workarounds. I was able to do a linux-only stint for a few months, which served me as a reset ground. Coming back to windows support was a real shocker at how bad doing _anything_ feels like.
If I'm not mistaken, wasn't Clean closed source and commercial for a long time?
I was very interested years ago, but I kept on thinking that without opening up it would eventually just fade into oblivion and never went beyond the toying phase. A common fate for the many languages with a single and commercial reference compiler/interpreter.
RHVoice sounds slightly more natural in some cases, but one advantage of espeak-ng is that the text parsing logic is cleaner, by default.
For example, RHVoice likes to spell a lot regular text formatting. One example would be spelling " -- " as dash-dash instead of pausing between sentences. So while text sounds a little more natural, it's actually harder to understand in context unless the text is clean to begin with.
I don't know if speech-dispatcher does this for you, but I'm using a shell script and some regex rules to make the text cleaner for TTS which I don't need when using espeak-ng.
Another tradeoff: espeak-ng with the mbrola doesn't offer all the inflexion customization options you have with the "robotic-sounding" voices. When accelerating speech, these options make a qualitative difference in my experience.
I can see why each of these can have its place.