Edit: This is now released. Say all works, though the audio becomes choppy sometimes. But it doesn't crash. Right! I now have a copy of Eloquence that works on the 64-bit alphas of #NVDA, with the following issues: say all on the web doesn't work (it stops whenever the type of element changes for reasons I don't understand), and dialect switching doesn't work (but it doesn't crash everything anymore). If you want to play, you need to follow the build instructions; I only understand about a quarter of this code and have no intention of actually releasing things that are still broken: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/
@jscholes Oh, also, I used spell check on the build docs. So I guess that counts. And Titet11 is Mexican and more comfortable working in Spanish, so AI translation was involved in communication and some of the comments. If you want to avoid anything that uses AI you need to avoid this, as it couldn't exist otherwise.
@jscholes So with more code updates this morning, the thing I'm noticing is that the more rewriting that is done, the less and less code there is from the initial AI rewrite. The AI solution mostly worked, but was over-complicated and multi-threaded where it didn't need to be. We're slowly arriving at code that is both simpler and works better.
@fastfinge I suppose I initially asked because of it defaulting to a Python helper process written in Python, using sockets as the IPC mechanism. Which is very AI, based on what will have been most common in the training data.
But for this sort of thing, I wonder about performance gains from shared memory, COM, or whatever with something other than Python on the other end.
@jscholes It's original code used C++ as the host, with GRPC for communication. I made it retry because I didn't want to deal with the complexity of the GRPC dependencies in an NVDA addon, I don't really understand protobuffs, and it just didn't feel any faster.
@jscholes Those are for version 6.4 of the DLL, and we use 6.1 because 6.4 has a bunch of changes like requiring registry entries for languages and voices that make it not portable, and several annoying bugs. I believe 6.4 also made a bunch of changes around threading. I already ran into issues with this, because the tts.txt is the manual for 6.4, and we need to use 6.1, the last release before IBM took it over.
@fastfinge How annoying. I thought there was also header files inside the Voxin packages, but I can't find them at present and not sure if they'd be any more helpful.
@jscholes Extremely annoying. I spent like two hours fighting with that because I'd given the AI the 6.4 manual, and it was doing things the manual said were allowed, but it wasn't working. Took me forever to realize that the DLL is a different version than the included manual.
@fastfinge Separately, I 100 percent think GRPC plus Protobuf would have been overkill and, in some scenarios, slower than the current "hand-rolled binary messages over a socket" approach because of overheads.
@jscholes You might be right. I just didn't wanna distribute like five different dependencies with the addon. Then it turned out that NVDA's version of Python doesn't include multiprocessing, even though it's built-in to Python by default, so I had to annoyingly include .pyd files and library code anyway.
