@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen Better options such as? And didn't you say two posts ago in this thread that "unless there's a good one we can use, this is blocked", implying that there isn't one?

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen Better options for a starting point existing doesn't mean we can simply drop it into GrapheneOS as a bundled app right now. That also wouldn't solve any problem without changing the app to have everything required built-in and already configured to work from the moment a fresh install is booted. We could then add a shortcut to the setup wizard for enabling TalkBack. It doesn't do any good if the app doesn't have a seamless auto-configured experience.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx is an example of a permissively licensed and more modern implementation. We have not reviewed it in depth and far away from being able to bundle a fork of it into the OS. All we know is that it's what many of our users recommend we use when this is brought up.

It also supports speech-to-text in addition to text-to-speech and various other functionality. It's more like Google's speech services app. Doesn't mean it's ready to ship.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen If we include this, there are other people who are going to be very angry about it because it's based on neural networks.

https://bsky.app/profile/stopgenai.com/post/3lp2mtrxnec2m

https://bsky.app/profile/stopgenai.com/post/3lp2n6lxgac2m

This is how modern speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, automatic captions, etc. are all implemented. If we tied our hands and refused to use anything using neural networks, we wouldn't be realistically ever able to include speech-to-text, translation, captions, etc.

@darkyen @GrapheneOS @joepie91 @J3317 maybe listen to the people who actually need this instead of your own idealistic tendencies. I’m not going to back off. I’m going to give you hell until you recognize you’re being awfully exclusionary just because the solution isn’t something you like. I’m not backing down. It’s there, it’s viable, it’s packaged into a nice little IPK, and you are rejecting it. That’s a you problem, not an ass problem. If you don’t stop turning up your nose at working solutions, you’re going to find yourself in a nasty situation because I will take to every platform on the net to let everyone know exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You’re making excuses. If you’re not going to develop for everyone, then don’t develop at all.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen There are, to my knowledge, exactly *zero* models in the LLM/GenAI space that are actually open-source by any reasonable definition, and there's good reason to believe that they can't ever be (because this amount of training data is virtually impossible to ethically source), so the idea of this kind of model as an open-source solution is essentially vaporware.

There is already a viable system which can be implemented today, as has been presented to you by someone *who actually uses these accessibility tools*, which is espeak.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen

> There is already a viable system which can be implemented today, as has been presented to you by someone *who actually uses these accessibility tools*, which is espeak.

No, a dozen people who depend on text-to-speech to use their devices have told us they cannot possibly get by with eSpeak NG as their text-to-speech implementation. They would use it to get from the start of the setup wizard to installing a proper TTS app. We want a decent feature.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen "We want a decent feature" is great and all, but right now you have *no* feature.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen eSpeak NG does not use a license we can use in GrapheneOS. Unless you convince every contributor to the eSpeak NG code to relicense their code as GPLv2 or a more permissive license, we can't use it. GrapheneOS is not going to become more restrictively licensed from AOSP. There are people who actually support our project and help us keep it going who care about this. We're not throwing away a large set of use cases and support for us by including GPLv3.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen I have literally suggested a solution for this several posts up, that would absolutely work.

"Do not want to do this" is a very different thing from "cannot do this".

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen We currently support 16 devices. Building for each device takes around 45 minutes. More importantly, testing each build including the future upgrade path takes a long time. It is not feasible to start making multiple builds of the OS. This is also not the only case where people are suggesting making multiple builds. People also want that for multiple other things. It is not actually a realistic solution. It would take an extreme increase in resources.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen That is just a lot of words to say "we do not want to do this, we do not think that accessibility is worth doing this".

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen (Which, incidentally, is *exactly* what the original complaint was about.)

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen You should check back on the article you spread and attacked us over. The person who published it retracted it and apologized to us for approaching it that way. They want to help us integrate and test something that is acceptable for us to ship instead.

The app which multiple people have recommended to us is https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx. We would still need to review it, fork it and integrate it to have a seamless out-of-the-box auto-configured experience.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen As I have brought up before, that system appears to be based on LLM/GenAI tech and models, which means it cannot ever be open-source.

And what the author of the article decides to do frankly has no bearing on my arguments here. You are still presenting "do not want to do" as "cannot do", which are two very different things.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen Like, to be clear: depending on circumstances, "we do not think this is worth the cost for the gain we get" *can* sometimes be a reasonable point.

But then be honest about what you're actually saying, take responsibility for your choice, and don't frame it as an impossibility that is out of your hands.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen

Proposing building and testing twice as many releases as the solution to anything where we cannot do both things at once in the same builds is something we regularly see about multiple topics including root access. It's not something realistic. It would require an enormous amount of resources.

16 separate 45 minute OS builds followed by a long release signing process and then delta generation from previous releases is already a huge amount to be doing.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen Once again, this is still just "we do not want to do it", regardless of how justified you feel your reasons for that decision are. But it is not that you *cannot* do it, so don't present it as if it is.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @joepie91 @darkyen it boils down to this. Either you or User first or your idealism first. User first would be getting this thing rushed because it’s locking people out, not oh that’s not our priority right now. This is not just something you can say we’ll get too later. If you can’t develop for everyone, don’t develop for anyone.

@joepie91 @J3317 @GrapheneOS @darkyen here’s what you’re saying. We don’t want to do this because we’d rather work on the shiny stuff. We don’t care if people are mad at us and get left out and have to potentially expose their personal information to someone. They don’t trust just so long as we can get the shiny stuff done.

@evilcookies98 @joepie91 @J3317 @darkyen We're not working on shiny stuff. We're working on keeping what we have now from substantially degrading. We're primarily working on porting to Android 16 so we can continue providing the latest privacy and security updates for GrapheneOS. We're also trying to fix a bunch of different types of regressions including regressed app compatibility from recently added anti-competitive checks for Play Store installation. We have our hands full not adding more.

@evilcookies98 @joepie91 @J3317 @darkyen What shiny stuff do you think we're adding or working on? When have we ever been focused on things like aesthetics or trivial frills? Our focus is consistently on important things. After Android 16, we also need to get several additional non-DNS-related Android VPN leak fixes we've implemented shipped, which we consider high priority but haven't had time to get fully finished and especially fully tested. Many of our users consider that very critical.

@J3317 @darkyen @joepie91 @GrapheneOS anything that is such a huge priority that it’s worth leaving people literally locked out over is shiny stuff. I tried to be patient with you back in the winter when there was genuinely nothing you could do, but now you can and won’t. We are asking you to bundle an app, not write 10 million lines of code.

@darkyen @joepie91 @GrapheneOS @J3317 i’ve done some research on this. All you would have to do is put it in the darn package so it would be installed. It doesn’t have to run at the system level. Most of the third-party engines are just regular apps. We installed them, they run. if you can bundle a bunch of fancy stuff that doesn’t even make sense, then you can bundle a TTS engine. You’re ignoring us.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen In what sense are the models for RHVoice, etc. open source in a way that these models are not? They're still a form of model with an unclear origin.

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen This was about espeak, not RHVoice; and to my knowledge, espeak is algorithmic in nature and not trained on a massive dubiously sourced set of training data, which means it does not suffer from the same problem.

I have my doubts that this discussion is going to be moving in a productive direction for either of us, so I'll leave you with this comment:
The way you've responded to this situation has damaged your reputation in my eyes *far* more than that article ever could have.

You've yelled at a blind person for expressing their frustration with being excluded, you've threatened pausing development on accessibility entirely (which feels rather "look what you made me do!"), you've repeatedly refused to take responsibility for your decisions by framing them as if they are out of your hands, and you've confirmed the long-standing rumours that you call all criticism "attacks" (which is something I'd remained undecided on until now because I didn't have enough information, but now got to see first-hand).

You yell a lot about how that article has "harmed the project", but if you're concerned about harm to the project, I think that you need to be looking inward instead, at the way you interact with criticism.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen

It's clear you've been heavily influenced by attacks on the project and team. If this is your attitude, avoid contacting us.

We haven't yelled at anyone. We were attacked with now retracted false claims, hyperbole and claims that we're cruel because we get things implemented slowly and need to use software meeting our requirements.

GrapheneOS is missing features some people need to use it. That doesn't only apply to blind users. We're working on it.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen

Not having features everyone needs to use GrapheneOS despite our ongoing work improving many different areas of usability and accessibility doesn't mean we don't care. It takes us a long time to implement things. We had no network location from 2014 until late 2024. We had no compatibility with apps depending on Google Play until summer 2021. We still have a bunch of legacy AOSP sample apps. We'd have SVOX Pico TTS if it wasn't removed from AOSP.

@J3317 @joepie91 @GrapheneOS @darkyen no one is asking you to build the darn engine from scratch people. There’s an APK already made. I have it. It exists. If you would do your homework, you would know that. Maybe if you don’t have the resources, tell people to quit working on the shiny stuff for a while.

@evilcookies98 @J3317 @joepie91 @darkyen What shiny stuff? We're working on keeping GrapheneOS alive despite having our lead developer forcibly conscripted to fight in a war. Our entire focus has been on Android 16 porting for weeks. The only things we've shipped recently are minor features implemented weeks or months ago which were sitting as open pull requests which hadn't been fully reviewed and tested yet.

We don't even have a real boot animation since our focus is so much on the core OS.

@J3317 @joepie91 @darkyen @GrapheneOS people, get your priorities straight. Locking people out is more important than any shiny update out. There will ever be. How was that so hard to understand? I swear if I knocked on some heads, they would ring Hollow.

@joepie91 @J3317 @evilcookies98 @darkyen No, it's not at all. What we're going to do is review, fork and integrate a permissively licensed text-to-speech and speech-to-text implementation. We're not going to double the amount of builds we have to make, which already takes far too long and has required significant changes to the house where most of the builds are done to accommodate the heat, power usage and network transfers. Doubling the number of releases to build and test is not reasonable.

@joepie91 @J3317 @GrapheneOS @darkyen that’s what I’ve been saying all morning. That would be like turning up your nose in a perfectly good new house because the walls were green and you didn’t like green. Although you could repaint it later, you chose to be stubborn and willful and just totally dismissed the whole thing.

@joepie91 @darkyen @J3317 @GrapheneOS why not just admit that you don’t actually give a crap? If you did, you’d realize what we’re trying to tell you. If we want something better will install it on our own later, but we need something that is there to get the darn phone through set up. Nobody said they would have to use it all the darn time. Your willfully ignoring us.

@GrapheneOS @joepie91 @evilcookies98 @darkyen is that really a bad thing though?, give us some thing, any TTS just to get setup and once setup we can install a TTS that we like

@J3317 @joepie91 @evilcookies98 @darkyen We are going to provide TTS built into GrapheneOS. It's going to be one which meets our licensing requirements. It's going to require us to fork a TTS app and modify it to work for this use case. We're then going to need to integrate our TalkBack fork into the setup wizard. This will require significant work overall. We're currently down our most productive developer and struggling to keep above water by keeping things working and keeping up with updates.

@GrapheneOS @joepie91 @evilcookies98 @darkyen ok, didn't know you were down a dev

@J3317 @joepie91 @evilcookies98 @darkyen Our lead developer for the past couple years was forcibly conscripted into the Ukrainian army due to the ongoing war. They were the one doing 90% of our recent ports to new quarterly and yearly releases. We're very worried about the port to Android 16 we need to do in June and have therefore hardly done anything in May beyond preparing for the port. We don't have early access to A16 because no OEM provided it. That is what we're dealing with right now.

@J3317 @GrapheneOS @joepie91 @darkyen are you seriously going to act like no one else on your team knows how to put an app in the package? It’s not like you have to rewrite the darn S from scratch. Talk back to his engine bundled, talkback uses engine, problem solved.

@GrapheneOS @joepie91 @evilcookies98 @darkyen ah, ok, mabey you should have figgured out this TTS stuff and making talkback work right from the start, then you wouldn't be having to worry about it now, i'm sorry your main dev is having to fight in the war

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @joepie91 @darkyen yeah, that sucks, it really does. At the same time, if you can bundle a bunch of fancy crap that doesn’t even make sense and that nobody can guess the function of because it’s name something out of a Star Trek film, you can take 25 seconds to do five clicks and bundle of TTS engine. it’s basically just a process you have to do every time you release the thing anyway, and yet you’re refusing to help us because you don’t like the license.

@evilcookies98 @J3317 @joepie91 @darkyen No, the app needs to be forked to work out-of-the-box without configuration. In order for us to use an app, it needs to be something meeting the license requirements. We also need to integrate enabling the screen reader we provide into the setup wizard.

Since this will be enabled by default and handling untrusted input, the security is important.

We're responsible for keeping our users safe and upholding the standards we have committed to providing.

@J3317 @joepie91 @evilcookies98 @darkyen GrapheneOS used to have TTS support: the SVOX Pico implementation dating back to Android 1.6. Google replaced it with their proprietary TTS app. SVOX Pico was completely unmaintained and ended up having severe security flaws. They fixed a few rounds of those security flaws, then dropped it from AOSP instead of fixing more of them. This was something like 8 or 9 years ago. Google dropped TTS as a baseline requirement from the CTS as part of this.

@darkyen @GrapheneOS @J3317 @joepie91 you have an open source engine right there in front of you, and you’re refusing it because you’re being petty and don’t like the license. If you did that to a regular user and refused to install something because you didn’t like the shape of the icon, then go ballistic you’d fix it, but since it’s an accessibility service that you don’t consider priority, it’s optional.

@evilcookies98 @darkyen @J3317 @joepie91 It is not us being petty. We have license requirements which we are committed to following. There would be serious consequences to us breaking that commitment.

eSpeak NG is not the only open source TTS app.

Regardless of which app we use, we'll make it work at first boot after installation without downloading any language packs, without configuring anything, etc. We need to add setup wizard screen reader integration. We have been working towards it.

@darkyen @GrapheneOS @J3317 @joepie91 when you reject something that would actually help your users because the license isn’t up to your perfectionist standards, that’s absolutely being petty. That’s like dumping a girl because she has brown hair instead of black. It’s shallow and superficial and ridiculous.

@evilcookies98 @darkyen @J3317 @joepie91 This doesn't have to do with perfectionist standards. We've made a commitment to not using GPLv3 licensing.

Bundling the eSpeak NG APK into GrapheneOS will not providing the accessible experience from the start of the setup wizard you want us to provide. It would only mean it doesn't have to be installed. There is significantly more to making it into a seamless thing which works out-of-the-box including activating TalkBack on the first setup wizard page.

@evilcookies98 @darkyen @J3317 @joepie91 There are multiple open source TTS apps available. We're going to evaluate them and choose the best one for us to use. We're going to make a fork of that, change the app id, review the overall app code and the attack surface, etc. We need to modify the app to provide a seamless auto-configured experience without needing to download a language pack. We need to add TalkBack integration to the Setup Wizard. We have been working towards it.

@darkyen @J3317 @GrapheneOS @joepie91 there’s already a shortcut. It’s been hardcoded in for ages. How do I know this? Because even Samsung hasn’t managed to fuck it up yet, and they fucked up all kinds of talkback related stuff. I have handled several different android phones. Hold down both volume keys, chatter box. All it needs is the engine. All we need is for you to stop being stubborn, give us an engine, and if we don’t like it, we can replace it. That’s what we do every single day with the Google engine. Not many people like it. We install something else over top of it.

@evilcookies98 @darkyen @J3317 @joepie91 The reason we made our TalkBack fork is as part of working towards providing this. The TalkBack fork has been getting tested and some major issues with it got resolved.

It often takes us a long time to get features finished. We had no network location included in GrapheneOS from 2014 until late 2024.

It is a non-profit open source project. We accept external contributions and most people we've hired started as external contributors to the project.

@GrapheneOS @evilcookies98 @darkyen @joepie91 hold on, so as it is right now you can't even turn on talkback at the setup screan? dam that's bad, i know a blind guy that got graphene installed but most of uss just arn't as smart as him

@evilcookies98 @darkyen @GrapheneOS @joepie91 agree, i see both sides of it but they had a long time to figure this out, before this conversation i new they had talkback but didn't know they didn't include a TTS engin

@GrapheneOS @J3317 @darkyen @joepie91 talk back already works with the set up wizard at a system level. It just needs an engine, and the one you’re so vehemently rejecting doesn’t even need any extra installations and such. The voice is right there.