ESpeak is pretty great, and now that Piper is using it, hopefully strange issues like it saying nineteen hundred eighty four for 1984 the year, can be fixed.
Yeah, it would be nice if the financial backing behind Rhasspy/Piper led to improvements in espeak-ng too but based on my own development-related experience with the espeak-ng code base (related elsewhere in the thread) I suspect it would be significantly easier to extract the specific required text to phonemes functionality or (to a certain degree) reimplement it (or use a different project as a base[3]) than to more closely/fully integrate changes with espeak-ng itself[4]. :/
It seems Piper currently abstracts its phonemize-related functionality with a library[0] that currently makes use of a espeak-ng fork[1].
Unfortunately it also seems license-related issues may have an impact[2] on whether Piper continues to make use of espeak-ng.
For your specific example of handling 1984 as a year, my understanding is that espeak-ng can handle situations like that via parameters/configuration but in my experience there can be unexpected interactions between different configuration/API options[6].
[4] For example, as I note here[5] there's currently at least four different ways to access espeak-ng's phoneme-related functionality--and it seems that they all differ in their output, sometimes consistently and other times dependent on configuration (e.g. audio output mode, spoken punctuation) and probably also input. :/
