Ok, I totally understand that no one here might have the answers, but does anyone know if Cerence has released any new voices in the past year? Apple disclosed that new voices are coming to VoiceOver, and I'm trying to understand if they mean more stuff from Cerence or new voices Apple has built in house. Personally I hope it's new stuff from Apple, I'd love for them to get back into the TTS game as Alex is still one of the best voices currently available in my opinion.
@ZBennoui It might be third parties? Apple is big enough for that to be a serious possibility, Eloquence clearly demonstrated that they actually do care about this stuff. It could be anything, from Ivona, Acapela or Neospeech, to Dectalk or other similar voices.
@miki I'm sure the only reason Eloquence got included is because Cerence now owns it and Apple has an ongoing deal with them to provide TTS in their products. Apple has a lot of stuff themselves, mostly the Siri voices but also Alex and some of the older Macintalk stuff as well. I'm going to assume whatever they're doing is based on machine learning, seems they have a new engine optimized for that because the American Siri voices are using it. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
@miki Just speculating here, but several months ago they released a research paper about longform speech synthesis and how a lot of users preferred that style of speech over traditional approaches. I wonder if what they're doing could be based on that concept, could be great for reading books and so on.
@miki That would be a a pretty big deal if they got that to run on device, traditionally systems like that require a lot of beefy hardware. Regardless we don't have that long to wait, only about three weeks and will see for ourselves. Really exciting stuff.
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