I recently undertook some courses that are heavy as hell on the reading. I’m a good reader when my ADHD allows it, but to nobody’s surprise, it does not mesh well with overly long, tedious articles, and a lot of them. It might help if I had a text to speech voice of some kind reading to or along with me, but I haven’t used those types of things in years and I don’t want to go sleuthing through seas of AI shilling bullshit to find one that’s not awful. Does anyone here happen to know of some programs that may help me out? I’m running Linux, fyi, and I always prefer open source tech, but even if it’s closed source, I’ll take it if it’s not trained on unwitting and unwilling people. It doesn’t even have to be good, just something lol

EDIT: Just found that Linux has a thing called Festival, which hasn’t been updated in long enough that I don’t think it COULD include “gen” AI. I’m just about to test it, but any other recommendations are appreciated.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    12·
    9 days ago

    Festival and espeak-ng are the traditional Linux speech synthesizers. Should be available in any repository. And as far as I know they more or less “just” translate the words into phonemes (per complicated rules) and then play those.

    • cloudskater@pawb.socialOPEnglish
      4·
      9 days ago

      Thank you! Oh wow, espeak-ng is way better then Festival, tho it’s not that bad itself. Is there a reason to use the latter over the former? I’m only just using these tools for the first time.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Just use what you like, i think they’re all fine. Espeak-NG is licensed GPL and according to Wikipedia, the algorithm is (ultimately) from 1995, so I don’t think there’s funky things going on in there.