That is fascinating for me how Eloquence is so much loved and supported by community and it always will be. Interesting that it is not DecTalk but Eloquence. When I see again and again how much this TTS is loved I always think is there any russian speech synthesizer that has that much care and love of community through decades? And I think it is Newfon. Now we have Newfon, Ru-tts which is supported and maintained by Igor Poretsky together with Rulex dictionary. Newfon is also updated and maintained by different developers. We now have Newfon for iOS which I use as russian synthesizer. That's pity there was no request for Russian in Eloquence back when it was developed.
Amir@amir@dragonscave.spaceEvery time I think the Eloquence/IBMTTS Community Dictionary has managed to cover every possible kind of word, another batch arrives and proves me wrong.
The upcoming 2026.09 release has become even more eclectic since my last look. Alongside obscure historical and regional vocabulary such as wanhope, bealach, shaliach, and tzibur, there are names like Cécile, Daymond, Vladikavkaz, Stellenbosch, Ingushetiya, and Prakash. And then there are words that seem to have been invented specifically to make pronunciation dictionaries work overtime.
Mathematics and scientific terminology get plenty of attention this time around. Diffeomorphism, heautomorphism, heautophany, katamorphism, symmorphism, and transmorphism now have proper pronunciation support, while biology contributes an impressive collection including guanophore, katharophore, scolopophore, spermaphore, zoanthid, and zoanthus. Chemistry and physics join in with endothermicity, exothermicity, monatomicity, and a selection of wonderfully Latin looking anatomical terms such as abomasus, membranosus, nervosus, and tendinosus.
There is also a distinctly human side to the list. Fubu, twatwaffle, necromancing, necromantist, necromass, and romantist sit comfortably alongside much more respectable vocabulary, proving once again that a pronunciation dictionary has absolutely no interest in judging its subjects.
And of course, the "max" family is still growing. alcoholmax, ballmax, bossmax, confidencemax, couplemax, datemax, facemax, gymmax, pianomax, studymax, whimsymax, and many others now give Eloquence a way to deal with a whole family of rapidly evolving internet expressions, including their "maxxing" forms.
There is one more thing worth acknowledging here: the Oxford English Dictionary. Its American English pronunciations, along with its regular updates, provide an invaluable foundation for a large part of this work. Without the OED continually documenting how words are actually pronounced and how the language evolves, many of these pronunciation fixes would be considerably harder to make with confidence.
And that is perhaps the most impressive thing about the Community Dictionary. It is not merely fixing a list of mispronunciations. It is continuously extending the linguistic lifespan of Eloquence, allowing a decades old voice to keep up with words from fields and cultures that its original designers could never have anticipated.
That is a pretty remarkable second life for an old but popular TTS engine.
https://github.com/eigencrow/IBMTTSDictionaries
