Piper TTS on Android is great, the project is called Sherpa Onnx. It doesn't require permissions either.
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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I've been using this for a few months now with Organic Maps and it's incredibly good. A few versions ago I noticed some issues with certain letter sounds but with frequent updates it now sounds so natural.
I found "vits-piper-en_GB-southern_english_female-medium" to be the most natural sounding voice for English.
Nice! It all depends on the model.
Thorsten has spoken 23+h of audios into his main dataset, crazy
RHvoice
Only english and a few others
That isn't a problem for English speaking countries. Maybe try espeak?
I'm not sure I completely understand the need to run an AI voice on your phone. It uses a lot of resources for little gain.
I mentioned espeak at least somewhere. It is 32bit and likely unmaintained. And the Android version is already better than what I had on Fedora KDE.
Yes, something like improved espeak would be fine and extremely efficient. But this works fine too.
Modern phones have NPUs for low power neural network tasks like those. Older ones hopefully use the GPU for that.
The apps are pretty flawed in that they have only one model.
And it is very impressive how espeak can do so much, so efficiently.
Its simply that nobody created a better voice model (and removed all the silly joke okes) for it, and ported the APK to modern Android with armv8a (64bit)
Is there a way to install multiple languages? I am would be using German and English, sometimes Italian.
Um ok but is this really a big deal? Good sounding TTS is nice but crappy sounding TTS is good enough for most purposes and is fairly easy. Speech to text is way harder.
For anyone that is dyslexic and privacy conscious it's a pretty big deal.
Its also nice for anyone that is only privacy conscious.
Speech to text exists with FUTO keyboard and whisper.
Espeak is the only TTS for german, and it is 32bit and sounds awful. It is quite embarassing to use that for navigating with other people used to... modern voices.