Text to Speech Conversion

Apr 08, 2011

Has anyone used SpokenText.net for text to speech conversion?  Other suggestions?

I am looking for a less expensive and lower maintenance alternative to professional voiceover.

Thank you!

9 Replies
James Brown

I honestly haven't heard any good text to speech simulators. There are some ok ones but nothing that meets my personal standards. There was a thread on this topic not too long ago. Plus I'm not sure if you are going to like the results and you may have to pay a royalty per use so my suggestion would be stay with the professional voice over.

James Brown

Watch out for these text to speech vendors. A lot of them basically have the same backend of NeoSpeech and you have to purchase a license for each voice and each party you sell the product to would also have to technically purchase the license or you would have to pay royalties to Neospeech. That's why I say make your own recordings if possible. 

James Brown

I guess this depends on what you consider sounding great. If you listen to the voices most of it may sound ok, but then you get the robot effect where you have pauses and improper pronunciation.

http://www.deskshare.com/text-to-speech-voices.aspx

Plus they don't divulge anything about the licensing requirements or royalties that may be imposed when using this product in a project that you sell. I know this because I had once did a lot of research into using text to speech for a commercial product. A lot of my research found that a lot times these companies were not strait forward about their licensing requirements. In other words the product that the voice was produced in may not have cost anything but the backed voiceToSpeech editor had royalties attached.

Here is an example. My company sells a product using a different vendor as our database engine provider. Our product costs x dollars but then we have to pay royalties to the database provider for use of their product. For each copy of the software we sell our database vendor makes z dollars. The same thing applies to most text to speech voice generators on the web.

Again, I would use caution. Most of these text to speech editors have one backed and as we know works derived from someones work is considered copyright infringement. You have to do your homework. What may appear to be free or cheap may in fact may cost you in the long run. You also need to be aware that with the internet, some of these companies offering these products  may not be operating in the US which means they may be operating in a country where the US cannot enforce our copyright laws.

Now I'll step down off my soap box. It's just been my previous experience, you get what you pay for.

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