Support and General Use > User Interface and Voice

why dose Rockbox do not have internal TTS(text-to-speech) capabilities ?

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rna023:
I hope RB can voice menus, directory names, and filenames with internal TTS.
Making talk files manually on RockboxUtility is very inconvenient and use much disk space.

evilnick:
There has been talk about having a TTS engine in Rockbox before, but it appears that it's not an easy thing to add.

We'd definitely welcome a patch to add that functionality in, so let us know when you're done coding it.

rna023:
I'm not a programmer, many cheap players from China have the internal TTS capabilities, I thought it was easy to add it to RB.

Llorean:
It probably wouldn't be too hard to add it to one specific player, if you were okay A) Changing Rockbox's license (probably to GPLv3) and B) not caring about supporting it for all players.

TTS becomes a lot more of an issue when you want features to work across all the players, because then it needs to be efficient to run on even very slow players, and able to deal with very limited RAM (especially while playback has a lot of data buffered).

As it stands, there has been work done in this direction at times, but the license of eSpeak interferes with the ability to integrate it as well, at least last time I checked (Rockbox is still GPLv2 right? I didn't miss that change?)

Pre-recorded voice files are also always going to offer much better quality than on-player TTS just because of most of the more polished PC voices simply won't be available on the player.

bluebrother:

--- Quote from: rna023 on June 10, 2012, 12:19:10 PM ---I'm not a programmer, many cheap players from China have the internal TTS capabilities, I thought it was easy to add it to RB.

--- End quote ---

I haven't seen any audio player that has such features -- except the "bigger" devices like Android phones, but those aren't DAPs in that sense anymore. Can you point me to some of the "many cheap players" you've seen?


--- Quote from: Llorean on June 10, 2012, 01:29:25 PM ---Pre-recorded voice files are also always going to offer much better quality than on-player TTS just because of most of the more polished PC voices simply won't be available on the player.

--- End quote ---

It's not only the voices, an important issue is also size -- just check the download sizes for commercial voices. For example, a simple Cepstral voice I just tried the demo earlier is almost 90MB for the voice only. There are commercial voices that need a few hundred megabytes just for the voices. We don't have any target that could even load this amount of data to memory.

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