Re: Text-To-Speech

[Ant Skelton <ant@xxxxxxx>]

Stuart Poulton wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Having just got ViaVoice working under linux, I wonder if anyone has
any
> experiences of other TTS packages available for Linux ?

There's AT&T's NaturalVoices, for which a bunch of
"voicefonts" are
available in both 8 and 16 kHz versions. There's a US male and female
(Mike and Crystal) and a UK male and female (Charles and Audrey).

A lot of people think Audrey sounds stuffy. I don't mind her, but I
don't think her speech is as well rendered for some reason. Charles
sounds like the guy that reads the shipping forecast on Radio 4. And
Mike is generic irritating American, so in our house we've gone with
16kHz Crystal, for that authentic "You have 5 minutes to reach minimum
safe distance" effect.

Visit http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/
for a demo.

On the down side, it's not free, and the linux engine now seems to be
curiously unavailable. They go on about it on the website, but won't
sell it.

Fortunately, as per my recent thread on the subject, the 'doze version
will work just fine under linux using WinE.

> Preferably with a perl / python module to control them.

They're command line jobbers, so you're laughing there. We use MisterHouse
here, which has built-in support for NaturalVoices. As yet it doesn't
support
the PC version under WinE on linux, but that should change in next
week's release ;)

HTH

ant
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