@fastfinge@nick Oh yeah! Damned got it! But compared with what we already have in other Eloquence 64 variants, or even in the older IBMTTS driver with ViaVoice, it's terrible.
@fastfinge@nick Honestly - and as I see it now and even as someone who sort of likes higher sample rates, the major issue holding openevv back is related to maddeningly troublesome ViaVoice quirks. Oddly enough, some appear to prefer ViaVoice to Eloquence. But I'm not one of them.
@amir@nick Same. I was sort of hoping that the ViaVoice quirks would either be fixed or made configurable, before any sample rate stuff happened. I think mudb0y just has so many people asking for so many different things right now, but hasn't quite developed the skill to say "no" or "later" to anyone. If I were him, I'd work with someone (even a non-programmer) to help him prioritize all the different things, develop a roadmap, and be the one to say "we're not doing this now, see the roadmap" for him, so he can focus on the actual work.
@fastfinge I really want to be wrong. Amir, you might actually be the most discipline out of the lot of us in documenting Eloquence behaviors, as it's part of your roll re: community dictionary. Can you write up all the differences you can find? It might be a good idea to create these in an issue and call them as regressions - given what Sam's Dad has to say about working at IBM, I'm comfortable with that designation. @amir
@nick@amir Honestly someone just needs to find a way to get Amir access to Claude Code or Codex. He could quickly fix so many things; he knows exactly what needs to happen and why in most cases.
@fastfinge That's an idea we should keep in our hats for now. Weirdly, I'm a touch hesitant that we should be digging in just yet because Stanislaw's agents already have processes and I'm not convinced they're documented in a way we can yet follow. At least, the docs intimidate me a bit anyway. If Stanislaw becomes unmoved for a time after the docs, then we'll talk about figuring out how to give Amir computing power to take a run at this. @amir
@nick@amir Yeah, that makes sense. Once I can get employed again I'm happy to throw a bit in the hat. Just...not until then, sadly. Though I do have prospects, so we shall see.
@fastfinge Yeah, I myself would feel more comfortable committing to someone's Claude Max for a month come Q1 27. Sam, you and i can discuss beforehand how to get around any possible geoblocking, E.G. putting a VM somewhere. @amir
@nick@amir Yeah, we could do that as well. I actually have used nano-gpt.com in the past, though, and they're reliable. In that case it was because OpenAI wanted my ID for age verification and I wasn't interested in giving them my passport.
@fastfinge Also, let's be on the lookout for someone who might do something similar for Finnish. ...God, I wonder what Ol' Stan's plan for that is, because that's gonna have to be reverse engineered all by itself. #headnova@amir
@nick@amir I know he's already done some work on adding Polish as a language, in order to learn what adding languages not already in viavoice will require.
@fastfinge The issue is that Eloquence already had the Finnish spec that somehow didn't end up in the IBM codebase he hammered. That means Finns are used to Eloquence behavior that already exists that someone is going to have to recreate whole cloth. Good luck, bro. @amir
@nick@amir Also, falling back to ECI for a single language isn't an issue. That's already what eloquence_64 does. It asks at startup what languages OpenEVV supports, then falls back to ECI for a language not included. I see a world where English gets better and better, and people slowly step by step switch over to OpenEVV. Then Spanish improves, and another group switches, etc. That's why I put it in the way I did. I don't think there'll be a single day where "Everyone uses OpenEVV now!" It'll probably happen over months and years, until we suddenly say "Hey, is anyone using ECI anymore? No? Okay, let's think about removing it."
