Text to speech in Storyline lessons

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