Forum Discussion
Text to speech in Storyline lessons
Nice summary, Joel!
I do disagree with one point, namely the price point you expect for commercial use. I'm working for a major dairy company doing internal training in Storyline, and while US banks or suppliers to the army may be awash in cash, we're certainly not, and would balk at "a few $100s" for one voice.
Thanks, Henrik.
Concerning the pricing of commercial TTS voices, it is a matter of economics: the commercial TTS voices are competing with the real voice talents. The price of a very reasonable voice talent service (narratorfiles) is $20 a page which works out to about $500/hour of recorded audio (a one-hour course). One hour of recorded audio is about a month's work so using voice talents for one developer comes to $500 a month. To compete, the commercial TTS voices are priced down accordingly, sometimes 50%, to be worthwhile - including any text editing required to modulate the voice. In addition, the price usually includes access to more than one voice.
For more details, have a look at the article I wrote with Tony Karrer:
Text-to-Speech Costs – Licensing and Pricing
Joel
Thanks, that's material I can use towards the budget holders :)