My profession photo taken several years ago. I'm wearing a light sweater there, I'm slightly smiling.

André Polykanine

@menelion@caneandable.social · Joined ⁨Aug⁩ ⁨2026⁩

A married and happy geek from Strasbourg, France.
Backend software engineer and accessibility specialist with 20 years of experience.
I live with my wife and our two cats, and I believe cats are the cutest, yet the most independent companions.
Pagan, worshiper of Scandinavian gods.
This account is multilingual, posts may contain strong language.
No alt text, no boost.
AI is our assistant, not our replacement, not our enemy.
Pro-European, pro-American, leaning to the right.
Opinions are my own.

Website
oire.org/
GitHub
github.com/Menelion
Spoken languages
English, Français, Українська, Русский, Deutsch
68Posts
1Following1Followers

André Polykanine boosted

Quin@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

It's honestly depressing how bad stock TTS APIs are across the board. Paperback on mobile has truly shown me this; I outline how the iOS side of this works in the quoted post, and Android is its own flavor of hacky: we synthesize ahead to temporary WAV files and chain MediaPlayer instances with setNextMediaPlayer() to kill the inter-paragraph silence put there with the stock player. On both platforms, getting a seamless reading experience means treating the system TTS purely as a text-to-speech renderer and building the player yourself.

Quin@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

@simon Spot on! Instead of letting iOS handle playback directly, I use AVSpeechSynthesizer purely as a speech renderer writing raw PCM audio buffers into memory, which then feed into a custom AVAudioEngine pipeline, which aggressively prefetches multiple paragraphs ahead (and behind for instant rewinds) to survive iOS throttling background synthesis when the screen is locked, resamples them to the hardware rate, and pre-arms the next buffer directly onto the audio node while the current one is still playing. That last one is also why transport controls like pausing and resuming mid-word feel instant. Say what you will about Voice Dream, but at least prior to it getting bought, have hardly used it since, it was the only app I ever saw get this right, and I wanted Paperback to as well. Android testing on your part would definitely be nice, but both of the primary Paperback developers use android as our daily devices, so that one has gotten more testing by nature of us relying on it.

André Polykanine boosted

Vsevolod Popov@Sevapopov@mastodon.ml

Есть 2 интересные вещи про песню группы Девятый район "Не забывай":
1. Мне одному слышится манера исполнения Самойловых?
Когда я впервые услышал эту песню до того, как посмотреть что это Алексей Никитин и группа Девятый район я подумал, что это ну уж очень похоже на Самойловых и может это что-то сольное от одного из них.
2. Если послушать или вспомнить эту песню хотя бы раз за день, можно не переставать её петь целый день! Так и делаю периодически сегодня!
youtube.com/watch?v=CNCjocdDeuA

André Polykanine boosted

Vsevolod Popov@Sevapopov@mastodon.ml

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.space

Every 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.
github.com/eigencrow/IBMTTSDic

André Polykanine@menelion@caneandable.social

Replying to @⁨Fragglemuppet@fandom.ink⁩

@Fragglemuppet That's what I do every day. I'm Pagan, but I love listening to christian masses and liturgies (Catholic, orthodox, Armenian, mostly Catholic though, especially Latin), Judaist chants and songs, especially Hassidic nigunim (absolutely fabulous for work and leisure alike), Hinduist, Sikhist and Buddhist mantras (also for hard work and meditation) and lots of other things. Great music is great music, and if people pray their god or gods, what is bad about it?

André Polykanine boosted

Nikolett Till@destranis@tweesecake.social

This song has been haunting me for a long while now and I had no idea what it is. A Greek friend of mine helped me to identify it though but since I haven't found any decent versions yet, I decided to experiment with Suno. You can listen to the result here.
audiopub.site/listen/5992977a-

#music #suno #greek

audiopub.site/listen/5992977a-0090-4eb6-8b62-cbd627cff2a6