August, 03 2004

So long as he has the necessary timbre, Tedious is an obvious candidate for the Voiceover IT position I wrote about on Monday - he even writes his own material. Here he sets forth a new story from the IT world. An excerpt:

Dick has a telephone.
Jane has a telephone.

Spot has a p2p file sharing application.
Bad spot!

Write Tedious, write!

I've been researching Text to speech (TTS) software lately. There is a wide range available, some of quite good quality. I imagine that high quality TTS will become part of consumer operating systems sometime in the next ten years or so.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of web-based TTS software demos around. Here are my personal favourites. Enjoy!

Rhetorical - Accent

Focussed on the call centre market, with high-quality voices and excellent pronounciation. They do a credible Aussie female voice. Try this text with American and then Australian speakers:

I can say Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Hobart, without sounding stupid.

Rhetorical also have "Valley Girl," the only TTS voice I know that can say "Like, y'know?" and "Well, duh" without any coaching.

Loquendo - Timbre

Loquendo's voices are full of timbre, like a television voiceover. I enjoy writing snippets from imaginary documentaries for their English male voice, Simon:

The Lesser Waddling Penguin can reportedly reach speeds of up to nineteen kilometres per hour. At such velocity however, even the slightest miscalculation can be fatal. Ooh! That has to hurt!

Cepstral - Sinister

Definitely at the cheap end of the TTS market, Cepstral would be a good choice for game developers. Try this: select the "Damien" voice, and the "Split Personality" effect, then get it to say:

All your base are belong to us!

AT&T Natural Voices - Realism

AT&T have spent years developing this product, and it shows. The US English voice, "Rich" would sound pleasant over the telephone. Try getting him to say:

Hello? Hello? I see. Someone will attend to it shortly. Please call again!

PS: Just wondering - has anybody out there used the Natural Voices SDK with the Java Speech API (JSAPI)?