As a talk back user, this is really handy. However, I will say that these speech models do not work very well at high speech rates, which is what I need for a screen reader user.

It is definitely much better quality, though. That’s for sure.

Also, for some reason it seems to skip letters sometimes. As an example when I turn on TalkBack foss or turn off TalkBack foss, it says “alkback foss turned on” or when i first opened thunder (lemmy client) it said “under”. Or at least that’s what it sounded like.

I will have to play with different models, but so far my favorite is English HFC female.

I am not sure whether I will use this as my day to day text a speech engine with my screen reader as of right now but I will definitely be keeping a close eye on this one because I really do like what I hear so far.

Edit: It could be that the model is trying to start talking before the speaker is ready, because it seems like it only has a big effect when you’re moving to a new element in TalkBack, which means that the system has to turn on the speaker first.