Voices don't work half of the time

[kingie 1]

I have installed the Amazon Polly voices on my PC and P2A does recognize them but half the time they don't play while the default Microsoft voice plays and the Amazon Polly voices play perfectly fine through the polly app. How comes they don't work half of the time?

[Mark2703 0]

Likewise, just installed I do sometimes get an error 

"Error generating speech:

1 validation error detected: Value "at 'voiceid' failed to satisfy constraint

..and so on with a list of lots of names

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by Mark2703

[skypilotYTS 11]

This is a long known issue and is not an issue with P2A but is on Amazon's side. 

An MSFS forum member does some type of business with them (or works for them) I forget which, and brought it to their attention that the voices do not always initialize when used with third party applications.

They said they were going to look into it, but that was a few months ago.

I eventually got rid of Polly and bought 13 Cereproc voices, much better quality with 0 issues.

[kingie 1]

2 hours ago, skypilotYTS said:

This is a long known issue and is not an issue with P2A but is on Amazon's side. 

An MSFS forum member does some type of business with them (or works for them) I forget which, and brought it to their attention that the voices do not always initialize when used with third party applications.

They said they were going to look into it, but that was a few months ago.

I eventually got rid of Polly and bought 13 Cereproc voices, much better quality with 0 issues.

The interesting thing is that when I configure one of the Amazon Polly voices in On Air Company it never not-works. This is why it makes me thing it is somehow related to P2A.

 

Did you buy 13 voices a 27 GBP each?

Edited March 16, 2022 by kingie
Added Q

[skypilotYTS 11]

9 hours ago, kingie said:

Did you buy 13 voices a 27 GBP each?

No, if you're interested in them, send them an e-mail and ask what they could do on X number of voices. 

[kingie 1]

7 hours ago, skypilotYTS said:

No, if you're interested in them, send them an e-mail and ask what they could do on X number of voices. 

Thanks for the suggestion!

Is the setup really difficult and fiddly? And do they work 100% or do you still have the occasional reboot of P2A? If they're really stable and work consequently I might try it out as well.

[skypilotYTS 11]

5 hours ago, kingie said:

Thanks for the suggestion!

Is the setup really difficult and fiddly? And do they work 100% or do you still have the occasional reboot of P2A? If they're really stable and work consequently I might try it out as well.

There is no setup really (nothing like Polly AWS). 

You download the voices via their downloader and they install automatically. Then you just open P2ATC, go into voices and add them to the random list or assign them and you're done.

Myself and 2 other friends I fly with all bought them, they all work 100% of the time for us without issue.

[ang58 11]

 

@skypilotYTS

Do your Cereproc voices include any of the non-native English-speaking ones? I am interested mainly in non-English European voices (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian etc) but not sure how well they will handle some of the more awkward pronunciations like SIDs and STARs etc. I have copied and pasted a few sample ATC phrases into the Cereproc demo page and they don't sound too bad, although mostly not 100% correct - e.g. they will usally speak numbers in their native language rather than English. But interested to hear any feedback from anyone who has used Cereproc for any length of time. It could be an expensive mistake going for the non-English voices, but I suspect the native English ones are very good.

[Burge 28]

native English ones are very good. i have 8 of them been using them since i got pilot2atc $25 buck a hit don't have any trouble with them

[skypilotYTS 11]

6 hours ago, ang58 said:

Do your Cereproc voices include any of the non-native English-speaking ones?

No sorry, I only use the English Speaking ones.

[jstnj 19]

Anecdotally, starting Pilot2ATC as admin ensures a higher chance that Polly voices work.

Disclaimer: sample size is small on this assumption

[ang58 11]

Thanks for the replies re Cereproc. I guess Europe is always going to be problematic.

[kingie 1]

On 3/18/2022 at 12:10 AM, jstnj said:

Anecdotally, starting Pilot2ATC as admin ensures a higher chance that Polly voices work.

Disclaimer: sample size is small on this assumption

Tried that, didn't really seem to make a difference. I wonder if the big issue is the fact it's cloud based rather than anything else.

[jstnj 19]

7 hours ago, kingie said:

Tried that, didn't really seem to make a difference. I wonder if the big issue is the fact it's cloud based rather than anything else.

Certainly...but its also why the voices are so good. Training on millions of user tts requests. Starting P2A as admin doesn't work 100% of the time, but restarting P2A seems to work, never takes me more than 2 restarts of the application to get it working, just check the Voices tab in Config. If the Polly voices work, I've never really had them stop working during a session.

[kingie 1]

17 hours ago, jstnj said:

Certainly...but its also why the voices are so good. Training on millions of user tts requests. Starting P2A as admin doesn't work 100% of the time, but restarting P2A seems to work, never takes me more than 2 restarts of the application to get it working, just check the Voices tab in Config. If the Polly voices work, I've never really had them stop working during a session.

I've never had them stop working during a flight, but they only seem to work about 25% or less when I start up P2A. And most of the time they don't work even if I restart the application 5 times.