We’ve had so much great work on Mimic from community members, some great contributions from @zeehio, @Nicholas_Peterson (LongBoolean), @forslund, julianrichen, @siavasht, @dabuk, and ivuk.
Our team is completely blow away by all the great feedback, contributions, and the amazing work that the community is doing. Really taking charge on the Mimic and it is already making amazing progress!
Thinking about this, the Mycroft team wants to put out our goals around Mimic so that everyone understands what we are hoping to accomplish.
Goals
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Festival (Festvox) Voice Compatibility - Mimic is based on Flite (Festival Lite), which works great with the Festival voices generated by the Festvox project. We would like to remain compatible with these voices in order to ensure that folks using the project are able to use a wide variety of existing voices, and to benefit from any continued development of Festival’s voice create process.
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Cross Platform - We are hoping to make Mycroft (and by extension Mimic) available on a variety of platforms (from embedded Linux devices and the Linux desktop, to Mac OS X, iOS and Windows. This also helps VocaliD provide good quality voices to their customers (those with disabilities that prevent them to speak). So, this is a great goal to have in order to help them and make a positive change in the world!
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Improved Voices and Quantitative Metrics - We want to improve Mimic and have those changes positively impact voice quality, latency, and the general experience. As we do this, we need metrics to ensure that we are, in fact, making improvements. So we need to, as a community, develop tests that gauge our progress and analyze whether or changes move the project in a positive direction. Mycroft, as an organization, can also use Amazon’s Mechanical Turks to listen to voices and provide feedback, which creates a good metric for gauging improvement on that front.
Those are our thoughts! Let me know what you think!