Better voices and TTS engines for Hal.

[vonsmith]

Does anyone know of any better TTS engines or voices for use with Hal than the one's listed below?

L&H British English - lhttseng.exe
Truvoice American English - tv_enua.exe
Mary Voices - msttsa22L.exe
Microsoft Sam and Mary
Cepstral - Frank, Emily, Duncan, Linda, Robin, Walter

I've been researching CoolSpeech, Fonix and other potential products. I've found that product info is sketchy and seems most often to focus on high-dollar corporate applications; automated phone centers, embedded applications, etc.

I've done a little research on Speechify, RealSpeak, Flexvoice and Elan. I'm not sure any of these are suitable for home MSagent use. Some of the professional application voices sound nearly human. The addition of controls for inflection, emphasis, pitch and other characteristics make all the difference in the voice quality.

My part time project is to modify Hal to read and comment on fables, fairy tales, children's stories, etc. I'm thinking something like an interactive story-teller. Ideally I'd like to find a British child's voice to read the stories. Stories read out loud seem to sound so much better with a British accent. Imagine hearing "Alice in Wonderland" read and critiqued by Alice herself. Harry Potter is still copyrighted, I guess I'll have to wait another 75 years or so to give that a go.

Any comments, ideas or

[rickzaba]

Well, this is an old topic, but hey!

Creative Labs used to have a TTS engine with their very old, early sound cards which had all the features you mention.

This TTS engine (among a few other ancient bits of software) is why I keep an old PC on my home network.

The TTS responded to sentences and phrases with appropriate inflection, and had child voices. I didn't use these so I'm not that familliar with them. The TTS could also sing.

I used the voices as speech in songs. My favourite was (natch: male) a female voice which sounded like a smoky voiced Russian girl, unsure of vocabulary and grammar, but it seeemed to have all the right inflections, as though dealing with a second language.

If this still interests you, I'll boot up the old fella and send what info I can.

I THINK they're sapi compliant, I seem to recall being able to have the TTS read my emails for instance.

[Maviarab]

Vonsmith []

Glad to see your still alive, was beginning to worry about you.

I've found that AT&T's voices are quite reasonable yet you didnt mention them ??...was this an oversight or a forced exclution ?

Be sure to check out the new site also, be nice to see you in there every now and then []

http://www.digitalgirl.co.uk

[Dr.Benway]

Sorry, Marius. This is in fact an old post by VonSmith.
We'll have to wait some more I am guess.

[markofkane]

The last time I looked at AT&T voices, they were over $100.

That is outrageous. I'd pay up to $20, but that's it.