Zabaware now offers Ultra Hal Text-to-Speech Reader with AT&T Natural Voices™. AT&T Natural Voices™ is the leading software solution for generating extremely natural-sounding voices. Many high quality voices are available from Zabaware. They are extremely natural sounding 16khz US English voices. They are almost indistinguishable from a real human speaker. Check it out for yourself:
Listen to an MP3 of the voices
Found this in the Ultra Hal Text-to-Speech Reader program folder:
Try an interactive online demo at the AT&T site
Hal Text-to-Speech with AT&T Natural Voices™ is available from the Zabaware website. Check the website for the latest competitive prices. The voices sold will work with any SAPI 5 compliant application including Zabaware's Ultra Hal Assistant 6.1, the included Ultra Hal Text-to-Speech Reader, TTS functions built into Windows XP, and many TTS programs from other companies.
The software requires about 600mb of disk space per voice and is available on CD-ROM. It requires at least a 500mhz computer with 256mb RAM.
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There are other SAPI 5 compliant TTS voices that work well with Hal.
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Usually any TTS voice (SAPI 5) that is installed with / in Windows, should be found or available through the drop down list of TTS voices in Hal.
NOTE: Not ALL TTS voices are compatible with Hal. Some require a special TTS READER program like Text Aloud and others. The voice companies will usually tell you in advance whether their voices will work or if they require a proprietary reader in order to be heard.
Some TTS voices that you can hear with HAL might not allow for Hal to do Lip-Syncing properly. Like someone glued the ventriloquist's dummy's mouth shut but you can still hear the voice!! Heh!!
I've used voices from Ivona, Cepstral, CereProc (might be two words) and NeoSpeech with pretty good success. YMMV.
