Hi there, I was asked by a friend of mine who wants to learn Estonian. Is there a stony and TTS on iOS or Mac? I browsed through the language settings, I wasn’t able to find anything, but I was wondering if there might be any third-party solutions that I can’t find because I don’t personally speak the language. Even if there’s one on windows that might be semi okay because they have a virtual machine. Thank you
Comments
A few ways
Shure. eSpeak for ios has Estonian support.
Neurokõne, a model developed by University of Tartu, is also available as an iOs app, but I wouldn't recommend using it as a VoiceOver voice, its terribly sluggish.
Neurokõne is also available for web
There is also an Estonian TTS for MacOs, created by Estonian Language Institute. Direct download, dmg and some some instructions, pdf in Estonian, so you probably will have to machine translate these. They just explain how to install the voice on mac, aca enable the voice in Accessibility settings.
Apple doesn't natively offer Estonian TTS or even UI language. Many of us here use finnish based TTS voices, as the pronounciation logic is rather similar, and Finnish language has way wider support, for example on eloquence, and other iOs and Macos native options.
Thank you!!!
This is amazing, thank you so much for all this information. Can you tell me, which voice is you think the best as far as intelligibility? I say that because as a language learner you usually want a clear voice. Yes, I was gonna suggest Finnish but as a language learner you really want to make sure you have a Voice specifically for that language so that you don’t learn bad pronunciation. I’m gonna suggest these options instead. I really appreciate you coming through for me.
Learning languages through TTS is a terrible idea.
If your friend wants to learn Estonian, there are free courses.
https://www.livelingua.com/project/peace-corps/estonian
Speech synthesizers notoriously mispronounce lots of things, yes even where you have a much more phonetic language like Estonian, and they routinely get accents wrong. You're going to pick up influence from what you hear, so good luck sounding like an Estonian robot I guess?
I’ve been around the language block
I’ve been around the language block for many years, I’ve been learning languages for over 15 years and I absolutely know this. But the fact is that she does need something to read the Estonian documents that are given to her as part of her course, that she’s already part of.