Here's another TTS engine I would like to find. It is a diphone-based TTS engine by Bell Labs from 1997, and it is called Lucent TTS. It supports several languages, including, US English, Latin American Spanish, German, French, Italian, Romanian, Russian, and Manderan Chinese. I attached the longest sample I could find of what it sounds like. it is reading an email message with the default US English male voice. Note: it may sound like FlexTalk, but it has its own intonation, I think it existed before (or alongside) it.

@Blindy I listened to the Skrillex track "Fuse", and I love it. It definitely sounds like something that would've come out back in circa 2010-2012! By the way, I know what kind of female vocals there are at the beginning. THEY are synthetic vocals, specifically the VST plugin Alter/Ego by Plogue, and the voice is named Nata from Vocallective.

Does anyone know how to fix the error on the Sonata NVDA addon that says "Cannot retrieve voice list. Please check your internet connection and try again."? I want to download my favorite Sonata voice, HFC Female.

OK, I’ve just noticed a major accessibility bug with the iOS version of Wikipedia, specifically the actions available. There’s an action where you can save or remove an article from the saved articles list. However, the actions are reversed. If an article is not saved, it will say remove from saved, and vice versa. That is bound to cause some confusion.

God, how long is this guy going to keep making new instances just to follow people. Heck, on the latest “instance“ that he is following people, when I last checked it about 10 minutes ago, he literally is following over 200 people, with no one following him back, and for good reason! He literally is going nowhere by doing all of this crap! This is the reason why I am kind of considering leaving mastodon, because of this one idiot! Like, does he want to receive over 10 quadrillion notifications coming from people that are despising this man? And to anyone of my legitimate followers who has rightfully ranted about this guy, I give you huge credit for telling the mastodon community who this person really is. This platform is meant to be peaceful, not chaotic. The sooner we can ban him from the Internet at large, the better we will be! again, this is not my typical thing that I post about, but I have to vent my anger out somehow. I wish there was a way to get rid of these fraudulent followers on mastodon accounts.

OK, I don’t usually make very negative posts like this, considering I want this account to mainly focus on the positive, but I am getting extremely infuriated of getting unsolicited follows on my account due to this trolling person. I want to set my account to basically have invite/follow requests only, because I cannot take this anymore! This is getting very out of hand, and it’s because of people like this, that caused my distrust in almost the entire blind community, because these people are literal, low lives, who have nothing better to do with their life, other than cause discourse and chaos, or just to get attention that they so do not deserve! Leave it to one person to ruin it for everyone else, even on a platform that is supposed to be more peaceful than the mainstream ones! God, I hate this blind community so much!

I once had a few years ago (circa 2019) an Android x86 VMWare VM (Android 9) with Talkback enabled. Anyone happen to still have that VM or other Android VMs with Talkback on?

OK, I have to take back what I said about people avoiding Acapela Infovox SAPI. It wasn't that that caused my SAPI 5 to get broken. It was BCUninstaller! I was uninstalling Loquendo, RHVoice, and SAPI 5 local Microsoft Azure voices, set it to delete all the left over registry keys, and my SAPI 5 got broken again! From now on, I will no longer be using BCU for my uninstallations! Time to do another full system reset!

I've just installed all of the (now retro) AT&T Natural Voices on my XP machine, even the non-English voices. It's interesting that an engine that is practically over 20 years old once was considered the "most natural sounding computer speech systems in the world" where as nowadays, it doesn't even hold a candle to synths like Eleven Labs and Microsoft Azure. What I find interesting about today's neural voices (at least for the local ones we have) is that they are smaller than unit selection and bigger than HMM, yet sound more natural than either method.

So I just found out that v3.1.0 of the neural NVDA speech synth sonata is available, but whenever I try to go to download voices, it gives me an error saying cannot retrieve voice list. Please check your internet connection and try again.