Russian voices and Hal

[aak]

I have Scansoft's Katerina, a female Russian voice @ 22Khz. Only, how do I get it to read Russian? I have no problem with Western languages: French, Italian, Spanish German, etc., all function well. Russian text presents a problem, as it skips the Cyrillic and deigns to read only the Arabic numerals indicating the footnotes.
Any suggestions?

[Art]

This might be a wild guess but:

Did you check in the Control Panel under Regional and Languages?
Under the Advanced Tab there are settings for practically every language.

Spasibo

[aak]

I had; no luck. However, as I'm using a French version of MSWXP, telling the system to read upper ASCII as Cyrillic louses up the French-accented vowels. Worse, when you change from the "home" language, MS empties all your mail messages. And even worse, if I have to toggle like that between language-incompatible software: Russian, Arabic, Chinese, etc., I use that software increasingly seldom.

[Maviarab]

Just out of interest, I believe some voices are "tied" to whatever language your OS is set too

This may have some bearing on your problem.

[aak]

It depends upon the capacities and parameters of the TTS software utilizing the voices. For example, the new version of TextAloud can handle it nicely, whereas the old one couldn't.

[Smokey]

Have you tried searching Russian sites for an answer.  It would seem Russia would have software that reads Russian. For example:
http://www.sakrament-speech.com/products/tts/tts4/
http://www.sakrament-speech.com/products/tts/

Then you can create your own:

TTS Builder 1.0 Software ID: 28105

TTSBuilder allows engineers to create their own Text To Speech Voice or Language using High Quality Open Festival Speech Synthesis Research. A complete step-by-step manual for such a creation is included in the retail version. The evaluation version has one such British Voice created using the mentioned step-by-step techniques. The TTSBuilder converts the heavy technical research oriented documentation into one simple practical guide.
go to here for the TTS Builder sample download: http://www.bluechillies.com/list.html?k=tts,3

Smokey

[aak]

Holy Moly Hokey Smokey!
While I've already invested in Katerina and can use her with TextAloud, this opens up whole new possibilities for Sanskrit and Hindi -- should Sakrament be equipped with a Unicode-compliant interface. If so, I shall be eternally grateful to the masked marauder for his bright and timely inervention.

[nolitanger]

I just picked up a neat Australian voice from TextAloud. The voice is actually a RealSpeak product from Scansoft (the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking). Unfortunately, I can only use the voice with a TextAloud product. Hal can't speak with it. ScanSoft has done the same thing with its voices inside Dragon Naturally Speaking: they can be used only with the product.

Perhaps Zabaware could negotiate a deal with ScanSoft to make the latter's voices compliant with the Ultra Hal software. ScanSoft would probably require Zabaware to engineer their product so that it only used the voice. It's too bad ScanSoft is so miserly with the distribution of its voices.