This Week in F-Droid
TWIF curated on Thursday, 06 Feb 2025, Week 6
From a prolific FOSS dev @woheller69 we now have another app, SherpaTTS, Text-to-Speech engine based on Next-gen Kaldi. We’ve complained before about the FOSS voice situation, that while RHVoice got some updates, it’s still limited to 8 natural voices, and the new eSpeak is great, supports many voices, but the robotic synthesized sounds are harder to tune and use. Out of the LLM gold rush we hope to extract some value for the end users too, and applying their magic here appears to give some really nice results.
How good? SeeHear for yourself on the test page.
After install and the download of your language of choice, don’t forget to go to Android Settings, System, Languages, Text-to-speech and select SherpaTTS as the preferred engine. Now your apps will use it to give you directions, like Organic Maps mentioned below and OsmAnd~, read text out-loud or even your notifications (via Voice Notify).
On related apps, from the same developer even, do also try Whisper (Voice recognition speech to text: you don’t type, you just talk and magically the text appears on screen) and Seamless (After talking, the text is translated to another language).
Organic Maps: Hike, Bike, Drive Offline, was updated to 2025.01.26-9-FDroid. In the past we had our share of long philosophical discussions with the OM app team, say about newly added ‘features’, and about the nature of Ads but it all ended well enough from our point of view. The latest version improves upon all these, map features aside, as it fixes two of the pain points that had the app flagged with anti-features more than one year ago. The added Kayak hotel links are now a setting users need to enable if they want and the CDN servers that serve your maps finally run FOSS software.
Tubular, A free lightweight YouTube front-end, is newly added. It’s a fork of NewPipe which brings support for SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike features and more.
Newly Added Apps
8 more apps were newly added
Updated Apps
142 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list)
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