Post B6fzkAVWalp85wOe6i by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
(DIR) More posts by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
(DIR) Post #B6fzaPKybGuDC1oBAe by GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
2026-05-26T03:32:39Z
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@MaddieM4 @freya Many blind users have told us they use Google's Speech Recognition & Synthesis. Why isn't it possible to provide a competitive open source implementation of what they provide? They're incredibly understaffed and make lots of bad decisions. We can use more bleeding edge technology than they can if we put resources into it.Now a blind user can start with a fresh GrapheneOS install and set it up themselves without needing help from anyone including installing their preferred TTS.
(DIR) Post #B6fzadxmDoGEYQ4Mam by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
2026-05-26T03:33:19Z
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@GrapheneOS @MaddieM4 because google can run at 600+% speech rate, and yours can't. neurall tts is always going to fucking suck anyway,m why did yall go for that and not just do your own clone of espeak?
(DIR) Post #B6fzafTiaXPBFm1O1A by tusharhero@mathstodon.xyz
2026-05-26T03:38:46Z
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@freya Hey, have you tried the android port of espeak? It is available on F-droid.
(DIR) Post #B6fziWsiR1leuKSj5s by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
2026-05-26T02:46:00Z
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ok. ok so whoever created the @GrapheneOS tts engine....... you were optimising for maps and sighted user tts, weren't you? because this is soooooo sloooow. so much latency
(DIR) Post #B6fziXmN66HrgwVAqO by GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
2026-05-26T03:03:16Z
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@freya No, performance was a major focus for it. It already has much lower latency than the existing options we were comparing against and there's huge room for improvement. It's the first public experimental release of the software and it has quirks to resolve including treating newlines as significant where reading newlines takes time and creates a barely audible sound. It doesn't use any form of hardware acceleration yet either. You're expecting too much from the first experimental release.
(DIR) Post #B6fzilVs2FPGHotC4G by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
2026-05-26T03:03:42Z
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@GrapheneOS I was hoping for something with eloquence- or dectalk- or espeak-level responsiveness I guess
(DIR) Post #B6fzimSiVSThEKQBn6 by GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
2026-05-26T03:17:52Z
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@freya It's a different type of software and is meant to become a competitive alternative to Google Speech Recognition & Synthesis. It has a lot of room for improvement including simply not reading newlines which can waste a lot of time if the text being passed to it doesn't have the whitespace stripped down.It doesn't use hardware acceleration yet and was trained on a AMD RX 6600 prior to obtaining an RTX 5090. It can't be expected to keep up with Google's yet but it will get better.
(DIR) Post #B6fzisV43dv9xLZ9Hc by GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
2026-05-26T03:21:51Z
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@freya It's already good enough for a lot of use cases and blind users can now use a fresh install of GrapheneOS without help. It's good enough to get through the setup wizard to install Google Speech Recognition & Synthesis or eSpeak NG.It matters a lot which device you're testing on since it might be twice as fast on a Pixel 10 than a Pixel 6. It solely runs on the CPU right now and Pixels don't have a great CPU. It will benefit a lot from hardware acceleration, especially on Pixels.
(DIR) Post #B6fzj0QOaswKXBRX7I by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
2026-05-26T03:19:01Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@GrapheneOS the problem is not how it was trained, the problem is that it's a neural tts voice. that is always going to have very high latency, and you're also fighting with the android accessibility latency. please. contract with someone to develop something like dectalk or espeak. no training data, just raw waveform synthesis
(DIR) Post #B6fzkAVWalp85wOe6i by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
2026-05-26T03:40:26Z
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@tusharhero I haven't yet, and I know that would work, but it just fucking sucks that the default tts sucks so hards
(DIR) Post #B6g4KPAbxBNBoP9HhA by GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
2026-05-26T03:47:05Z
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@MaddieM4 @freya Our TTS and screen reader don't need to be the best options for blind users yet but rather good enough to set up the OS themselves including obtaining their preferred software. Prior to this OS release, it wasn't possible for a blind user to set up GrapheneOS themselves after installing it. It's now very straightforward.Google doesn't release the TalkBack source code properly and some functionality depends on Play services. It's fine because it's good enough to obtain any app.
(DIR) Post #B6g55h3vFUAKuiZLKi by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
2026-05-26T03:49:14Z
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@GrapheneOS @MaddieM4 ....................... "it's fine because it's good enough" no. that's not how this works. can I ask, do you have any blind developers who actually tested the fuck out of this?
(DIR) Post #B6g55iUXvz3ZLa27TE by GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
2026-05-26T03:54:39Z
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@freya @MaddieM4 It needs to be good enough to easily set up GrapheneOS the way people want it including installing their TTS and screen reader of choice. It doesn't need to meet the extremely bar of being what someone who entirely relies on TTS chooses to use as their TTS engine to achieve the initial goals for it. Our Camera app is nowhere near as fancy as Pixel Camera but it works and people can install Pixel Camera if they want it. We don't expect our Camera app to satisfy a photographer.
(DIR) Post #B6g9SDBGuffoiP02KG by freya@social.highenergymagic.net
2026-05-26T03:22:41Z
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@GrapheneOS a tts engine should not require hardware acceleration. it is a bloody waveform generator, but you're just assuming tts engines have to be neural-based. they don't. look at DecTalk, look at IBM TTS / Eloquence, look at something like that
(DIR) Post #B6g9SEZlj4rZ2fT79E by GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social
2026-05-26T03:26:13Z
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@freya Our goal isn't implementing one of those. We want to have a natural voice capable of reading a lot more text well. It's entirely possible to make it perform very well. Tensor and Snapdragon both dedicate a lot of hardware to neural network acceleration. Pixels don't have competitive CPU performance and haven't focused on it. A major part of why recent Pixels don't have a better GPU is they dedicated a lot of space to the huge TPU and GrapheneOS doesn't yet use it beyond image processing.
(DIR) Post #B6g9SFyyUqcTP8Gl4i by fiore@brain.worm.pink
2026-05-26T05:29:21.019773Z
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@GrapheneOS @freya you are literally talking to one of the people the feature is supposed to be for, maybe listen to some feedback?