Frontend for Text-to-Speech, or "GETTING MY COMPUTER TO TALK" (1 Viewer)

[Vince Maskeeper]

I know Microsoft has a text-to-speech engine either built in to the OS, or available for download. I have used it in conjunction with EUDORA and MS READER- both applications can pipe text to the Text2Speech engine and output speech in a computer generated voice.

I want to be able to just output speech directly from a Word document or text document, or would even happily use a basic textbox interface- I just had a project I wanted to use computer synth voice-- and can't find any easy way to pipe custom text to the speech engine.

Anyone know anything about this??

-Vince

 

[Chris Hovanic]

Friend of mine uses http://www.microsoft.com/speech/download/sdk51/ with good results... he thought that they may have some plugin's that may do what you need.

Good luck

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Chris,

Cool- looks like the new package comes bundled with VB samples that have talking apps- perfect!

Thanks

-V

 

[Harris_C]

Vince,

Here are a few links that maybe helpful.

naturalreaders.com
nextuptech.com/TextAloud/download.html
bytecool.com/dltextsnd.htm


Sorry about the cut and paste, but I have not been here long enough. I cannot post URL's :frowning:

I am curious what are you trying to do? I was working on a project that would allow someone to give Voice Commands to a computer system, and play DVD's, Audio etc.. somewhat the reverse, but anyways.

 

[Steven K]

I work for a TTS company (in fact Im a TTS software engineer).

You're best bet is to download Microsoft SAPI 5.1 as Chris mentioned... it ships with a number of voices. Note that these voices are all formant-based - that is, they are based off of a computer algorithm and are not actual human voices.

If you are interested in high-quality TTS, there are a number of options available to you, but most run around $1,250 for a standard license. These engines are known as "concatenative" engines, because the speech is made up of actual segments of human speech which are "concatenated" together to make speech.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

I was specifically looking for "computer generated" sounding voices- the more digital the better. It was for a small inside joke with a pal...

-Vince

 

[Kris McLaughlin]

For a cheesy sounding voice for joke-type stuff, I use the built-in Windows tool.

By typing the text you wat spoken into a Notepad window, you can get it to say anything you want.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Vince, if you can dig up some old soundblaster discs, who doesn't love Dr. Sbaitso?

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

That was my point of my frist post- Some OS ship with the TTS engine built in, but I can't figure out how to pipe text to it (using wordpad or anything else for that matter). If you know how, post.

-Vince

 

[Mike LS]

Vince,

Try

http://www.cfs-technologies.com/home

and download speakonia. It's free and it seems to work pretty well. Just enter the text into the entry box in the program and press play.

You can also save the output as a .wav file for future use.

Best of all, it's free.

 

[Steven K]

Vince,

If you have a SAPI 4 engine installed, I can send you an application that allows you to enter text into it, press "speak", and it will speak the entered text (a standard Microsoft sample application). Is this what you are looking for? You can also download the SAPi 4 or SAPI 5.1 SDK from Microsoft which includes extra voices as well as a slew of different applications (both TTS and ASR).

If you are having trouble, let me know - I can generate some files for you if you do not have the ability to do so.

If you are looking for a realtime screen reader, they are available but they do not come cheap. There are a few companies who make these: GW Micro, GH Braille, and Freedom Scientific come to mind.

Edit: if you want to create WAV files online, you can do so as well. Just go a web page of a company that makes TTS engines - the largest providers of TTS engines are: Scansoft, Speechworks (now part of Scansoft), Nuance, AT&T Bell Labs, and Elan.