Comments on: Text to Speech Software and Voices http://curbcut.net/tools/text-to-speech-software-and-voices/ open and accessible Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:07:43 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Matt Palmerlee http://curbcut.net/tools/text-to-speech-software-and-voices/comment-page-1/#comment-217 Matt Palmerlee Fri, 28 Jul 2006 03:12:23 +0000 http://curbcut.net/2005/08/text-to-speech-software-and-voices/#comment-217 I've spent lots of time working with Text-To-Speech (TTS) software and dealing with the many vendors that provide TTS engines, the company I work for Conversive, Inc. ( http://www.conversive.com/ ) develops customer service portals using NLP and many of our deployments use animated characters with Speech Synthesis, we use Microsoft's Speech API 5.0 (SAPI 5.0) compatible engines only to simplify development and lyp-sync. SAPI 5 voices sound far superior than the older SAPI 4 voices supported by MS Agent. If you don't want to spend much and just experiment with TTS technology I recommend Cepstral, but their voices are somewhat robotic sounding, the next step up is the AT&T voices offered by wizzard; better than cepstral, but still not as good as the really great sounding voices from Nuance and Loquendo, but those voices are thousands of dollars for a server licence for a year. If you want to try out free SAPI 4.0 voices, you can download the old L&H SAPI 4.0 voices for free, you can use SAPI 4 in any MS Agent compatible program including Conversive's Verbot 4 Product at http://www.verbots.com/ It's really a shame that there aren't more freely available high-quality TTS engines out there, I know there are some open source projects developing TTS but from what I've heard they all sound like Microsoft Sam. I’ve spent lots of time working with Text-To-Speech (TTS) software and dealing with the many vendors that provide TTS engines, the company I work for Conversive, Inc. ( http://www.conversive.com/ ) develops customer service portals using NLP and many of our deployments use animated characters with Speech Synthesis, we use Microsoft’s Speech API 5.0 (SAPI 5.0) compatible engines only to simplify development and lyp-sync.

SAPI 5 voices sound far superior than the older SAPI 4 voices supported by MS Agent. If you don’t want to spend much and just experiment with TTS technology I recommend Cepstral, but their voices are somewhat robotic sounding, the next step up is the AT&T voices offered by wizzard; better than cepstral, but still not as good as the really great sounding voices from Nuance and Loquendo, but those voices are thousands of dollars for a server licence for a year. If you want to try out free SAPI 4.0 voices, you can download the old L&H SAPI 4.0 voices for free, you can use SAPI 4 in any MS Agent compatible program including Conversive’s Verbot 4 Product at http://www.verbots.com/

It’s really a shame that there aren’t more freely available high-quality TTS engines out there, I know there are some open source projects developing TTS but from what I’ve heard they all sound like Microsoft Sam.

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