Hi guys. I'm a totally blind Samsung phone owner living in the Russian speaking world. Mostly I use TalkBack. My problem is that I find it hard to normally use my phone between the 2 languages with no efford.
I want to read in English a lot from my phone and would prefer either listening to an engine whose voice is English by default or to a Russian voice that would read English words out the way they're spelled as if that was Spanish or Finnish: the word "colonel" would be read as "tsall-on-el". That would still be OK. The least thing I wish with my level of English and ammounts of new words I come across is a Russian language engine that supports English, yet reads everything in a strong Russian accent, and moreover, misreads about 40 per cent of words.
I will experience the problem, no matter whether the prime language of the phone is set to Russian or English. I tried using Google TTS Voices and setting language detection to aggressive, but it never detects the language right and doesn't switch when I need it the most. Since Russian writing is based on the Cyrillic alphabet, any English speaking voice keeps silent. Another thing I don't like about this engine is when it doesn't recognise English and reads it with the Russian voice, it misreads so many words in such weird ways that even short chat messages are hard to make out. My English is enough to handle the full usage of the phone. So I tried that thinking this could go better, but it turned out even worse: I might read in English, then want to reply to a message in Russian, but the engine won't switch, so all I hear is silence. Although sometimes it will read a Russian text with a delay of 5 seconds or so, I can't figure out the pattern for the choice because very often it doesn't read anything.
There are few more non-Google Russian voices that support English, but again, they distort lots of words. If I worked in a specific area, say programming, the set of words would be rather limited and I would get used to that and know what those utterances stood for. But I'm studying English related to all possible spheres every day and keep stumbling upon new words with obscure spellings all the time, so I never want to stop every 3-4 words to check the spelling and then guess how those words should be read or check upon them.
At the moment, I'm using a Russian voice that does read words the way they're spelled, but it is so monotonous and quite unintelligible, I got used to it, still can't listen to it for long.
I am aware voices meant for English reading make mistakes when it comes to stress patterns, but I want to have just one thing to bear in mind. At least they would read a word more naturally than a Russian engine would do, and they distinguish between V and W. Russian TTS engines never do, so I guess that isn't the worst choice.
Also, I wonder how this is implemented in iOS.
Since my web activity consists on 80 per cent of English, I stick to NVDA on Windows, I managed to make this more adaptable for bilingual usage. The "tsall-on-ell" option, but way more expressive. I interact with native English speakers and listen to a lot of non-TTS stuff, so it isn't a big issue. I'd like to adapt the phone as well so I don't have to take my laptop when I'm on the go.
Any bit of advice or experience?