I’m trying to find a replacement for NaturalReader in Linux but I’m not finding anything as good.

I have played around with different engines, such as Espeak (too robotic), Mozilla TTS and Coqui, and Piper. But I’m looking for an application, not just an engine, something that would allow me to open up a PDF, pick a spot and read from there, then be able to move back and forth on the document. Ideally, I would like to also be able to tell the application how to pronounce certain words.

I haven’t figured out how to make Okular use The best I have found is ReadAloud, but it’s just a browser addon. Okular doesn’t seem to be able to use something like Piper EDIT: but Pied exists: https://github.com/Elleo/pied which makes it work.

Any ideas?

(I use Debian btw :P )

  • rodbiren@midwest.socialEnglish
    3·
    22 hours ago

    Kokoro is absolutely incredible for how small it is. It can run on CPU fairly quickly and the results are so consistent. I’m even working on an absolute wacky idea to use a genetic algorithm for voice cloning because the tensors it uses for voice style are just so small. It’s an awesome application.