Shower thought: I wonder if any #blind kids today are growing up on espeak the way we grew up on eloquence? Is there a future where espeak is out of date and ancient, and people are clinging to it with the desperation people today cling to eloquence and dectalk? Honestly y'all, espeak read isn't that bad. I just wish espeak was usable on IOS; the available app is old and littered with bugs. #a11y#screenreader#accessibility
@fastfinge Michel voice variant for me. Or Michael, no idea why they both exist since they are identical, or appear to be.
That said, what about the bugs in the espeak app on ios? It works pretty decently for me here at least, the crackling issue only happens after past a certain speech rate and I've never had cause to go that far with it.
I know there is an issue on gh about updating it and the dev said it would be done, no idea where that went off to if anywhere.
@fastfinge Oof yeah in that case, I get you, definitely.
Well, in a way I'm still glad we have it on ios, because on android it's, excuse my french, shit. Or was, last time I had android in hand. No way to set the variant, the app wasn't even belonging to espeak on the play store, it was full of ads, and android 10 broke it so bad it became unusable.
Meanwhile ios side, espeak survived 16, 17, 18 and 26 and has no ads, you get access to all variants with a pleasant enough interface.
Kind of crazy because eloquence for me used to be my go to. But seeing as ibm tts is shit on linux, that I use espeakup anyway, well. I tolerate eloquence mostly as a fallback, these days, whereas before I absolutely wanted nothing to do with espeak, until I found out about Michel variant.
@xogium Okay so, for gits and shiggles I looked closer into the state of espeak on Android. The app in the play store is broken. However, you can download an APK from the official github, and that works fine; it's up to date, modern, and has no ads. Why isn't the official APK from the espeak-ng github on the play store? Who knows! It's open source; you'll take your inexplicably broken things and like it that way, darn it! Oh, maybe it's not on the Play Store because it's on F-Droid? Hahaha no! Get your APK from github just like you do for Windows apps; no package management, for you, buddy.
