It's June 10, 2024, at 4:00 PM Central US time. Almost every blind person that owns an iPhone has installed the iOS 18 beta. Some are playing retro games with the new, AI driven screen recognition. Others are gladly using DecTalk as their main voice, the Enhanced Siri voices that use ML to speak using emotion and context, as their reading voice, Eloquence as their notification voice (sent to one ear to minimize distractions), and finding it amazing that VoiceOver emphasizes italic text, and emboldens bold text. Others are finding it amazing that they can navigate their whole phone using Braille screen input, searching to find things by typing a few letters, or just swiping down through everything. A few are connecting their multi-line Braille displays, and feeling app icons and images, made much more understandable through touch, using an AI filter.
The next day, when news of all these features filters down to Android users, they quickly begin hammering Google, wanting DecTalk and Eloquence on their Pixel phones, like iOS users have. But Google is silent as always, only just now having given Chromebook users high quality Google TTS voices.
Note: great liberty has been taken to imagine the coolest outcome for the vague feature announcements Apple gave for VoiceOver users. We'll see just how cool, or not, they actually are on June 10.
@Lottie I wouldn't doubt it. Someone now owns DecTalk, and can license it to companies. that's ho the BT Speak has it. So, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has it too. I mean, honestly, there aren't that many other TTS engines that blind people want that aren't on Apple devices, and new voices were mentioned specifically for VoiceOver. I mean it could be Piper, but I'd expect them to get DecTalk out of the way first.
@pixelate@Lottie I highly doubt DECtalk would officially be on iOS considering the legal situation is complicated. The BTSpeak is using DECtalk 4.99, which is the version on GitHub. I suspect the HumanVoice LLC story is a cover up, since it would make Blazie Technologies look bad if they admitted to using leaked source code in a product.
@pixelate@Lottie If I were to guess which voices are going to be added in the next iOS release, I bet you it is some neural voices that can run locally.
@datajake1999@pixelate@Lottie I wondered about that. I've never heard of that HumanVoice company before. Googling for it brings up an insecure webpage that doesn't appear to have anything to do with dectalk.
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