Text to Speech - Again
Jan 28, 2013
I know there have been several posts about Text to Speech, and I have read most of them. I am having a hard time finding any of the voices out there that actually sound natural. I am remaking our compliance training and using Storyline to do so. I am creating the voices out of Captivate 6, which uses some of the same voices a lot of the different voice engines out there use. The problem is, they are just so bland and robotic. No emotion, mispronunciations, automaton sounding. I dont even know if there is a solution for this, but I thought I would ask one more time.
Is there any truly natural sounding text to speech out there? Thanks!
8 Replies
No TTS I've found is perfect. They've gotten better over the past 5 years. This is the one I've used in the past:
http://www.ivona.com/us/
Loquendo offers emotes and shifts within their TTS but I haven't found any of the shelf / affordable tools that use the Loquendo engine:
http://www.loquendo.com/en/demo-center/interactive-tts-demo/
Hi Eric,
I would love to hear some additional ideas from some other folks here as well on the exact same question.
Here is what I found in my research on the topic thus far...
Good - Ivona
Pretty Good - Loquendo
Pretty Good - NeoSpeech
Couple of other things...
Eager to hear more from some other folks...
Bob
I would also love to hear what people are currently using.
I've trialled a few of these, hoping to save time on projects but I have never found one that sounds human, particularly when using longer (in syllables) or more technical words like 'simulation'. I do agree with Bob that the female UK voices sound the best.
I would also like to add that I do not sound like the Australian accent option on Ivona. I think if I used that on a training module people would think I just compiled sound bites of Paul Hogan from Crocodile Dundee (80's movie where he put on a really thick fake accent).
Hi Eric,
I know we spoke yesterday about our human-quality Text To Speech, but I wanted to take the opportunity to share our demo with the community, so everyone can try our voices: http://www.ispeech.org/text.to.speech
I would also like to highlight that we can adjust and improve the pronunciation, and we offer custom voices on demand. If anyone is interested I can help, you can send me an email to anna [at] ispeech [dot] org
Yeah i agree with you.Thanx foe sharing such an informative post.
Anna is right!
Hi Eric, you might want to check out the voices at YAKiToMe! http://www.yakitome.com. There are many free, natural-sounding voices to choose from. The software allows you to convert documents of any length for free, unlike the other so-called "free" websites out there. And there's built-in pronunciation editing software to make it easy for you to correct pronunciations you don't agree with. You can download the resulting audio in standard file formats, like .mp3 and .ogg.
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