Text to speech in Storyline lessons

Ciao Maurizio,

we are using TextAloud and soon we will be switching to Linguatec.

In TextAloud we use Daniel as our male english voice...

Geert

Thanks a lot Geert, are the two softwares free? Do you have some technical documentation that explain how to insert these applications in storyline?

Thanks again

I explain better what I have to do: I would like to integrate a text to speech tool inside the learning lessons. I don't want that the user uses an external application...

Hi Maurizio,

You may be interested in trying iSpeech Text To Speech API: http://www.ispeech.org/api

It's really easy to integrate, so you can add TTS capabilities totally transparent to the end user. There are over 40 voices available in 26 different languages, and the quality of the voices is top notch. You can test all the voices here: http://www.ispeech.org/text.to.speech

If you are interested let me know, I can help you. My email address is anna [at] ispeech [dot] org

Best regards,

Anna

I too have looked at speech synthesis for e-learning. The Captivate NEO voices in  captivate 5 and 6 were usuable, in particular the female voice was ok ish. But many clients throw their hands up in horror when you mention artificial speech.  I just did some googling and came across http://www.naturalreaders.com which seems to have a solution with a choice of Acapela voices (the UK Graham one sounds reasonable) for around £100 or so.

I see that Storyline outputs all its text as a word doc file so it should be possible to do a bulk conversion.

But in truth none of the voices sound convincing to my ears and you lose all the nuances and word stresses  that adding voice to e-learning should provide anyway.

If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them, meanwhile Maplin do a great USB Podcast mike for £40 - sigh.

Ciao Maurizio,

Both applications are not free, they are not very expensive 20$-30$ (http://www.nextup.com)

The voices we use are about the same price.

The procedure is very simple.

You enter your text into their editor

Listen to how it reads out the text

if you're happy then you can save it as an .WAV or an MP3-file.

StoryLine & Articulate can import tyhese file (slide/slide)

Geert

I can't recommend a text to speech option, but the question got me thinking about how to post process something that was generated by tts.  After a few minutes of playing with MorphVOX and Adobe Audition, it seems like you can apply some vocal effects that take the computer generated edge off.  Has anyone else given this a try and if so, any thoughts?  Sadly, I don't know if this would help Maurizio out if he needs to do text to speech on the fly in storyline rather than embedding .wav or mp3.

Cheers,

Mark

Thank you all for the very interesting answers. I realised that I didn't explain in a very clear manner what I need. I try to fix: I would like to insert a button inside each page of the Storyline lesson to make a text to speech on the fly when the user click on the button. Only if it's impossible, I would consider the solution of exporting the texts, using a tts to produce an mp3 file of each text and importing the audio files in Storyline.

That said, I know that it's almost impossible to realize tts audio files that seems real human voices (I already worked with Loquendo, an Italian company acquired last year by Nounce, and Acapela:  with a very hard work you can reach a very similar result. But it's not worth the hassle: it's less expensive record real voices). Nevertheless I think that it's better than nothing and it could be a useful service for users with problems like dyslexia...

Two other points:

- I'm (unfortunately ) Italian; so I need tts with italian voices

- the learning lessons are for commercial use

Thank you all.

Bye

Maurizio

Hi Maurizio

 I believe NaturalVoices has some italians voices too

Cheers

Geert

Thanks Geert, yes, it has. In the next few days I will make some tests and I will come back to you.

Have a nice weekend

Maurizio