[webproducers] Re: text to speech and 3d image service
- From: Andrew Walter <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: webproducers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:09:31 -0700
First - full disclosure. Adi (the founder) and I went to school
together so I've known him for years. That said, my reco has nothing
to do with that. It's totally based on the experience of doing this
sort of thing for a few years now (Until very recently I ran the
delivery portion of EVB so have worked on Elf Yourself for office
max, unleash your beast for levi's and a variety of other "upload
your face" and text to speech enabled applications for either our
direct clients or other agencies.)
I've seen this done a couple of different ways, from "write-your-own"
to "piece-something-together-from-different-modules" to using
oddcast. After seeing a few tries with other options, I always opt to
use oddcast.
What they provide is a very simple to implement solution that
packages phone or text input together with the output and voice
selection. You send input data. You tell it what voice you want and
can use a markup language to alter that voice (raise the pitch,
adjust the speed, etc). You get back an sound file (mp3 or aiff last
i remember) and just play it.
Unless someone else has released a competing product recently, the
other solutions require a lot more research, configuration and
implementation time. You may save on the cost of licensing the
service, but you spend the money on developers putting it together.
If launch date is a factor, it will take more time to piece something
together. And testing - you need to test like a m*&&*^)()ucker. And
the quality of the voices: the open source ones can be a little
sketch. You *can* license voices -but this is another cost and you
have to figure out how to implement them.
Last on cost is hosting - you end up sending a lot of data and doing
a lot of processing to do the conversions. I don't know what traffic
levels you're expecting but this can definitely cause scale issues.
Oddcast is ready for it. And if something goes wrong they have the
support services ready.
What I would do is this: Make sure you have the parameters of your
project together (duration, projected traffic levels, voices you
want, etc) and your budget and give oddcast a call. They should try
to work with you on cost.
One other potential option: Jib Jab (http://sendables.jibjab.com/). I
think they sell their service as well, but I never worked with them.
Hope that helps.
Andrew
On Oct 19, 2009, at 11:35 AM, claudio chea wrote:
> Looking for a product that works similarly (text to speech in a
> graphic
> module that 'speaks' the entered text), that's more affordable than
> oddcast.
> Any help will be appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
>
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Andrew Walter <me@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Within the past year or so. What do you need to know?
>> On Oct 19, 2009, at 11:13 AM, claudio chea wrote:
>>
>>> Hi list;
>>> Has anyone used recently a text to image / speech tool like
>>> oddcast's (
>>> www.oddcast.com) lately?
>>>
>>> thanks!
>>>
>>> Claudio Chea
>>>
>>>
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