Telling a text-to-speech reader how to pronounce things?

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by fabien.benoit.19

@Tex2002ans what tts software do you use actually?

On Android, I use PocketBook Reader to read my EPUBs, and just have the built-in "Google Text-to-Speech" as the chosen TTS engine.

Good enough for me.

Note: About a month ago, someone on Reddit recommended "Balabolka" to me, but I haven't tested it yet.

I've been wanting a TTS->MP3 program for quite a long time. If that can pull some of those higher quality, more human-sounding engines, that would be great. (And if I could listen on the computer... sugar on top!)

The only TTS->MP3s I tested in the past used the built-in Microsoft voices, and those were robotic-sounding junk.

If you're aware of some better TTS on Windows (local device preferably, no cloud stuff...), I'd be very interested.

Side Note: For the video and audio stuff... I actually use this on Android:

• NewPipe to watch the Youtube videos
• AntennaPod to listen to podcasts

Both of those have an option to "Skip Silence" + allow high (and fully controllable) speeds—NewPipe allows up to 3x speed, and AntennaPod can go up to 4x.

On Windows, similarly, the "cut silence" tools I'm aware of just don't work as smoothly/"magically" as those Android versions.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

I've been wanting a TTS->MP3 program for quite a long time. If that can pull some of those higher quality, more human-sounding engines, that would be great. (And if I could listen on the computer... sugar on top!)

You might want to check out the following projects:

[GUI Plugin] TTS to MP3: Create MP3 audiobook using Windows TTS
Daisy Toby

[fabien.benoit.19]

@Tex2002ans Well, that's a lot to me. Need to wrap my head around.

NewPipe and AntennaPod are both open source apps, so can be customized to support new features.

As of pocket book ereader. I'm a bit puzzled. There's a need for TTS->MP3 converter. In the end you are to have just an audio file. Is that enough for you? Cause the app perhaps allows to switch between text and audio when you need that, tracking current position for you.

@Doitsu
Do you listen to podcasts or audio books yourself?

[kevn57]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Note: About a month ago, someone on Reddit recommended "Balabolka" to me, but I haven't tested it yet.

I've been wanting a TTS->MP3 program for quite a long time. If that can pull some of those higher quality, more human-sounding engines, that would be great. (And if I could listen on the computer... sugar on top!)

I used to use the Calibre Viewer but now I use Balabolka portable.

http://balabolka.site/balabolka.htm

It takes the ebook, displays a plain text, you have a choice of voices both installed and online(Google, IBM and some more). It highlights the text as it's read so it's easy to follow along. It can create mp3 files with subtitles, that can then be made into a video with text that follows along the voice. Or the mp3 can be played in an Audio player that displays lyrics.

In the status bar it gives you info how far % you are in the book, how long you have been reading and estimates how long to finish the book. It reads many formats as well as the ability to paste text to be read.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

You might want to check out the following projects:

[GUI Plugin] TTS to MP3: Create MP3 audiobook using Windows TTS

Heh, yes, yours is one of the TTS->MP3 Plugins I was thinking of.

You're the one who initially helped when I was discussing EPUB->TTS->MP3.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Daisy Toby

Thanks. Wasn't aware of this.

* * *

(Edit: kevn57 responded as I already typed my entire post, so I'll leave it as originally written.)

Originally Posted by kevn57

I used to use the Calibre Viewer but now I use Balabolka portable.

[...]

It takes the ebook, displays a plain text, you have a choice of voices both installed and online(Google, IBM and some more). [...]

Fantastic. I'll definitely look into Balabolka soon.

* * *

Originally Posted by fabien.benoit.19

As of pocket book ereader. I'm a bit puzzled. [...] Cause the app perhaps allows to switch between text and audio when you need that, tracking current position for you.

Yep. PocketBook highlights all the text as it reads along. You can also hop around the ebook (or manually highlight a line text), then have it begin speaking from that exact location.

For me, some issues are:

• TTS can only be played on that specific (Android) device.
  
  • With an MP3, you can take that and carry it anywhere.
    
    • For example, playing it in the car.
      
    • Or playing the MP3 on Windows (in my usual music player), with the superior Android voice.
• TTS via PocketBook is nearly real-time. (Wasting CPU/Battery.)
  
  • Let's say I have a 100k word book. In PocketBook, the phone would take hours to speak sentence-by-sentence:
    
    • 100k words / 150 words per minute = 11.1 hours.
  • If you were exporting directly to MP3, you'd be able to generate audio as fast as the CPU can go.
    
    • Afterwards, playing the final MP3 would barely take any CPU/battery.

So, for example, it would be nice if I could set the basic TTS settings, like:

• Speed
  
  • Dense material, like a medical text, or topics I'm unfamiliar with, I'd have to slow way down.
    
  • A basic news article I want to read through, I can bump it up.
• Pitch
• Voice
  
  • I prefer the default Google TTS Female American English voice.
• [...]

Then create a finely tuned MP3 just for me.

Then I could take that MP3 and play it anywhere:

• Computer
  
  • With superior speakers
    
  • Or on wired headphones (my damn phone has no headphone jack).
• Phone
  
  • If superior MP3 was generated on computer, I'd be able to move MP3 here + listen to it while in bed, doing chores around the house, etc.
• Car
  
  • Won't be fiddling with controls, speed/pitch, etc. + can easily play/pause using car controls, just like music.
    
  • You'd be able to create a whole MP3 playlist, like 12 articles, and have them already prepped for a trip.
• [...]

With an older version of Android (8??), before Google crippled the API to record TTS->MP3, you used to be able to do this.

But that's right around the time I obsessively dove into all this TTS + podcasting stuff, and began to seriously pay attention to the whole audio side of books!

Originally Posted by fabien.benoit.19

There's a need for TTS->MP3 converter. In the end you are to have just an audio file. Is that enough for you?

Yep. Just getting the MP3, with higher-quality voices, would be fantastic.

Doesn't matter to me if it's Android or Windows-based, as long as I get that high-quality audio!

And for icing on top:

If it could understand basic HTML or EPUB, then it could do nice things like an MP3-per-chapter, pause slightly while reading Headings, etc.

Side Note: Firefox's Reader Mode, on desktop, has a TTS button to read websites:



But, sadly, the Firefox Android version doesn't have this! So, again, you're limited to the crappy robotic Windows voices.

Side Note #2: I haven't ventured into full Screen Reader programs yet, like JAWS or NVDA.

Perhaps these things already handle some of my use-cases, but from what I gather, these programs drastically change the way things work + introduce performance regressions (like Firefox slowing down due to all the extra Accessibility overhead).

(You can go into extreme customizability with these tools though... like reading advanced HTML + skipping reading out URLs, making specialized noises for <em> or <i>, etc.)

Side Note #3: This MP3-generation may be where "Balabolka" can come into play. Like I mentioned above, I haven't had the chance to fiddle around with it yet.

According to that "Balabolka" video aariatui on Reddit recommended to me, it looks promising for a piece of my use-cases.

[fabien.benoit.19]

Let's say if you have a budget like 300$ per month, what is the best paid software for the purpose?

[Tex2002ans]

No idea about the commercial side. Like mentioned in Post #6, there is the yearly Interspeech conference.

That's where a lot of the bleeding-edge audio generation research gets discussed.

And so much of the higher-quality TTS has shifted towards cloud-based, then charge users per word.

(I believe tools like Balabolka exploit the free "demo" sections on Amazon Polly [IBM, Microsoft, etc.], by sending small snippets of text. No idea if you get rate-limited or what when feeding entire books in there. Usually those demos limit you to a few hundred characters at a time.)

[fabien.benoit.19]

What's about podcasts and books themselves. Does it take much per month for you?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by fabien.benoit.19

Let's say if you have a budget like 300$ per month, what is the best paid software for the purpose?

Crazy. If it's not free or a cheap once off purchase it's inaccessible to the majority of partially sighted or blind.

Cloud is absolute stupidity for it, it needs to be local. That's usually an attempt to monetise people's activities.

Unless you are laying out ICs or similar, renting software is mugs game. Paid SW for ordinary people should be less than $200, for once off. Not an annual licence.

Other than high end CAD/CAE, and some high end publishing software used by only a few specialists, no software should be rental, and only as high as $200 (once off) for high quality software. Some companies have got very greedy with their high price rental models, not even justified by quality.

[fabien.benoit.19]

@Quoth
There's an open source version trying to compete with cloud tts.
https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models

[fabien.benoit.19]

@Quoth, @Tex2002ans, @kvn57
I can provide an offline tts solution for free, if you help with beta testing. Are you interested?

[Notjohn]

>correct typesetting is "1,000 km" and "12 m"

That's the way I would write it, though with a full stop, but British books, especially from academic presses, often omit the space (and the full stop of course). The book I'm reading at the moment is from Cambridge University Press, by a German-educated Cambridge don.

[Jellby]

Fullstop as in an abbreviation? That's wrong, units are symbols, and are written without fullstop (but there would be a fullstop if that's the end of a sentence, of course).

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by fabien.benoit.19

@Quoth, @Tex2002ans, @kvn57
I can provide an offline tts solution for free, if you help with beta testing. Are you interested?

Sure. Send me a PM.

Don't know if I'll be able to get time to test it out in-depth, but let me know more info.

Originally Posted by Jellby

Fullstop as in an abbreviation? That's wrong, units are symbols, and are written without fullstop (but there would be a fullstop if that's the end of a sentence, of course).

Originally Posted by Notjohn

The book I'm reading at the moment is from Cambridge University Press, by a German-educated Cambridge don.

From a quick look, Cambridge University Press's own Style Guide says this:

Measurements

Avoid leaving a space between number and unit of measurement (10km, not 10 km). Commonly used measurements include: cm, mm, km, g, l (litre), MB, GB, kHz, MHz, KB. Follow the International System of Units (SI) as a guide for units of measurement. If your source material uses imperial units, always include the metric equivalent in brackets.

but they are wrong.

SI Units should always be typeset with the space (non-breaking and/or thin).

(For more info on that, see "The International System of Units (SI)" standards (PDF).)

Non-breaking Spaces

"10 km" is considered a single chunk, so it would be awful if broken across lines such as:

The person ran 10
km home.

Typesetting with non-breaking spaces alleviates this problem.

Thin Spaces

The other issue is a normal space is "too large"—making "number + Units" look like 2 separate words—so a thin space between allows them to look like a single, cohesive whole:

• 10 km (space = Okay/Acceptable)
• 10 km (thin space = Best)
• 10km (no space = Wrong)

This typographical difference becomes much more apparent when working on documents with:

• many units
  
  • Including temperatures!
• equations/formulas
  
  • Especially inline!
• large (complicated) units
  
  • kg/K = "kilograms per kelvin"
    
  • m/s^2 = "meters per second squared"
    
  • kJ/kg·K = "kilojoules per kilogram per kelvin"
• + large (complicated) numbers
  
  • 1.0635kJ/kg·K (Wrong)
    
  • 1.0635 kJ/kg·K (Correct)
    
  • 1.0635 kJ/kg·K (Acceptable)
• lots of numerical data.

Across single sentences, it doesn't make much difference, but across entire paragraphs + books, it begins to add up.

Here's a random page I ripped out a Thermodynamics book I worked on:

Thin Space vs. No Space vs. Full Space



- - -

Side Note: This example was just what I had on hand + whipped up quickly.

Of course, this bad-spacing-between-units issue would look much worse in Word/ebooks. (LaTeX does a good job hiding it.)

- - -

(Inline) Equation Spacing

Similar typesetting needs to be taken account with Maths formulas too.

Take the equation "x MINUS y EQUALS negative three z":

• x-y=-3z (No Italics = Wrong)
• x-y=-3z (Hyphens = Wrong)
• x−y=−3z (Minus Signs = Better)
• x − y = −3z (+Spacing = Best)

Again, the entire equation is "a single chunk", so:

• shouldn't be broken across lines (if possible).
  
  • If there is a linebreak, then it can only be allowed before certain symbols (+, −, =, ...)
• Mathematical spacing rules apply.

Here's the sample page above...

Without unit+equation spacing vs. the final "thin spaced" book:



Especially see "S1" and "S2" in the lower paragraph (GIF comparison):



See the readability difference? Now times that by hundreds of pages.

Originally Posted by Notjohn

That's the way I would write it, though with a full stop, but British books, especially from academic presses, often omit the space (and the full stop of course). The book I'm reading at the moment is from Cambridge University Press, by a German-educated Cambridge don.

I think this is similar to the editor's (wrong) rule of "get rid of all double spaces".

That rule was morphed and applied because of decades of typographically-inferior technology:

• typewriter
  
  • Only had a single type of space.
• early computers / word processing programs
• bad/piss-poor hyphenation/justification algorithms

but there's no need to keep forcing that "single space rule" when we have much better tech now.

Cambridge's editors probably got sick of Word (and similar programs):

• breaking units across lines
• adding huge (and inconsistent) gaps
  
  • Bad justification!

so they decided to go full-insane and combine the numbers+units together...... instead of selectively applying non-breaking spaces.

- - -

Side Note: See my related discussion about non-breaking spaces between initials+last names:

• 2021: "RegEx: Insert nbs between initials, etc."
  
  • Antidote can detect+insert non-breaking (or thin) spaces between:
    
    • Units
      
    • Initials
      
    • Punctuation (French)
      
    • (+ many other cases)
      
  • LanguageTool can detect+add a space between:
    
    • Units
      
    • (Is aware of other cases. May be added some time in the future.)
      

And see the double-spacing discussion way back in:

• 2019: /r/writing: "O vs 0"
• 2019: /r/writing: "I finally finished my first novel. Here is my process, and lessons learned."
• 2014: "[old thread] non breaking spaces (* and *) automatically removed"

[Tex2002ans]

I ran across the EPUB3.3 specs today.

Seems like latest draft was released a few days ago (January 22, 2022):

• w3c.github.io: "EPUB 3.3 Overview"
• w3c.github.io: "EPUB 3 Text-to-Speech Enhancements 1.0"

In the EPUB3 TTS document, they discuss using SSML + CSS Speech.

And, perfectly in line with this thread's initial question, they describe:

"How to get TTS to pronounce certain things?"

By using "Pronunciation Lexicons".

You'd use <lexicon> + optionally supply a separate PLS file:

EXAMPLE 5. The following example shows a pronunciation lexicon for Japanese.

<lexicon
     version="1.0"
     alphabet="ipa"
     xml:lang="en"
     xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/01/pronunciation-lexicon">
   <lexeme>
      <grapheme>EPUB</grapheme>
      <phoneme>ipʌb</phoneme>
   </lexeme>
   …
</lexicon>

Example 6

The following example shows two pronunciation lexicons (one for Mandarin and one for Mongolian) associated with an XHTML Content Document.

<html … >    
    <head>
        …
        <link rel="pronunciation" type="application/pls+xml" hreflang="cmn" href="../speech/cmn.pls"/>
        <link rel="pronunciation" type="application/pls+xml" hreflang="mn" href="../speech/mn.pls"/>
    </head>        
    …
</html>

More technical info on PLS files can be found here:

• w3.org: "Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) Version 1.0"

Now, how likely it'll be that actually trickles down into actual ebooks + ereaders??? That remains to be seen...