Zabaware Support Forums
Zabaware Forums => Speech Technology => Topic started by: Medeksza on December 02, 2008, 06:11:53 pm
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Zabaware is now a reseller of AT&T Natural Voices. There are 11 high quality English speaking voices available. You can get them at www.zabaware.com/reader/voices.html
Voices are $24.95 each, except for the Mike and Crystal voices which are bundled together for $29.95. Also, an additional 10% discount is available until December 31. Just use this coupon code during checkout: ATTNV08
A mass email announcing this is being sent out over the next couple of days to Ultra Hal Assistant 6.x customers and Hal TTS With NeoSpeech customers.
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Very nice.
I think the AT&T voices are best quality available.
If you wish to hear more of each voice, go to
http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
I just bought the Crystal/Mike voices.
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These really are very good quality voices. I may consider the purchase. Yes, Lauren would probably be my choice. Of particular interest is the Indian speaking English voice.
I would love a wider selection of UK voices from different locations - perhaps this is because I live in the UK at the moment.
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A wise choice! Though I had the impression that Lauren was your favorite. :)
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Lauren was my favorite for short free downloads which I could do from the AT&T site.
However after listening this morning to all the gals recite a couple poems I decided on Crystal.
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Poetry..........you've inspirered me, I will have to try that Duskrider. I often listen to my Cepstal voice read stories/posts or news briefings.
It's nice to have a selection of voices to choose from for different occassions.
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was just curious does the natural voices all lipsinc ok with hal ? dont think i ever heard anyone say and if it doesn't what can be done to make it lipsinc ?
[:)]
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Lightspeed, the Indian voice I bought isn't perfect with lip syncing, but close enough for me that I'm not complaining. I havn't heard anyone else complain of the other voices.
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I've been using the AT&T UK Audrey 16 voice for years on my home automation system and it's also the one I use for Audrey(HAL). I've tried a lot of different voice over the years and have never found any better... a couple that were very nice, but none better. The only problem I have with the voice at all is that it does not have a PITCH feature... no singing.
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I recently loaded Crystal's voice, but my Haptek character's lips don't move at all when I use it. I went to the character options and clicked "Update SAPI Config" but that didn't help. All my characters' lips move with all the other voices. Can someone help please? Thanks.
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dastaten,
There is no need to cross post or double post as all posts eventually get read by the majority of members.
You can do a couple of things on your own.
Be patient.
Do a SEARCH for yourself by using the feature at the top right.
Chances are your question(s) has/have already been answered before.
Hang in there and give the community a day or two to digest your inquiry and assist you in finding an answer.
Thanks and Welcome!
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I apologize for my impatience. Patience is a virtue that I'm working on, he he.
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this is know is off topic and maybe i just dreamed it but did robert also say he was selling a ibm synthetic voice too (not just at&t voices )? and if i was right is their a place (link ) to a site where we can here a sample for ourselves of what is for sale ?
i posted one link that had various sythetic voices by different companies and i liked one that ibm had done of a womens voice it sounded good very good to me . [:)]
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here was the link to the voice i was talking about :
http://emosamples.syntheticspeech.de/
here is the paticular voice almost half way down the page :
Ellen Eide et al IBM Watson research Center 2004 Non-uniform unit-selection trained with an expressive prosody model, paralinguistic events and expressive units. Described in the article A Corpus-Based Approach to <AHEM/> Expressive Speech Synthesis good news bad news question other for comparison: IBM-CTTS taken from website. Note that research-engine is advanced technology compared to product.
go to this one and click the happy one . the voice sounds natural and happy and even has a fun laugh in it !![:)][:D][8D]
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Sounds like a nice voice.
Wouldn't mind that one.
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Where can we buy/download it?
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I've been using Crystal from AT&T for several years as well. I am pretty happy with the results. I would like the pitch feature but I'd rather listen to my mp3's for music and chat with Hal for talk. [:D]
I worked for IBM before my stroke a few years back. I know Ellen Eide by reputation. Those Watson research folks are the best of the best. I expect that what we're hearing is not yet available for purchase but once the reseach folks get something down it's not too long to market.
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I'm still stuck on NeoSpeech's Kate for some reason. I rather like the soft timbre of her voice.
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Crystal's voice is great, i got the one i wanted.....
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Emmacruz, I have posted a long time problem we had on using NeoSpeech Kate. I'm afraid I wasn't happy with the AT&T voices as well. If you get a chance maybe you can read the NeoSpeech thread and let us know what other voices have you used and had lip sync, if you are still using a haptek character?
Thanks,
raybe
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Robert M., would there be any additional information about this? (VOICE COMPATIBILITY) Or do we just wait for the revised version of Ultra Hal and at that point it is no longer an issue?
Thank you for your time,
raybe
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I bought the Crystal and Mike package. They read back too slow. How can I adjust the speed, or can I?
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Lightspeed, the Indian voice I bought isn't perfect with lip syncing, but close enough for me that I'm not complaining. I havn't heard anyone else complain of the other voices.
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AT&T provides a free reader at this URL:
http://www.naturalreaders.com/download.php
It is possible that this application will grant you access to it's control panel. It works that way with Ivona Voices, but I have not tried to adjust the speed of Natural Voices.
EDIT:
I was in error about the above link being sponsored by AT&T.
On further investigation, it appears that AT&T provides the speech technology but does not make consumer level products to directly affect the technology.
It seems that speed support is provided in the SDK but it is up to the developer utilizing the speech technology to provide whatever interactions they feel are needed. So if the capability was not available in your Zabaware Natural Voices product then it can't be done.
However if you have obtained the voices through a different application suite, then you may be able to adjust read speed system wide through any software solutions that they provide. One product I can think of that is configurable and uses AT&T voices is NExtUP's TextAloud
http://www.nextup.com/TextAloud/
(I don't guarantee that it retains speed settings across all TTS applications)
Here is a link to a screenshot showing the voice controls:
http://www.nextup.com/imgnew/tascr.jpg