[access-uk] Re: Acapela Voices.
- From: "Roy Bannister" <roy.bannister@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:08:28 +0100
Hi Leonie, I do realise that concatonative voices are memory hungry. I would
have thought the response on my machine with it's spec would have been better
than I have found them. I have used other concatonative voices previously and
found them smoother. I think the Acapela voices are rather expensive. This is
purely my opinion, I am pleased I had the opportunity of evaluating them.
Thanks for your interest. Good Luck, Roy.
----- Original Message -----
From: Léonie Watson
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2008 5:27 PM
Subject: [access-uk] Re: Acapela Voices.
It may not be the case here, but it's worth knowing that the Acapela
voices use concatonative speech synthesis, as opposed to engines such as
Eloquence, witch use formative speech synthesis. The trade off is between
realism and responsiveness.
Concatonative synthesis is based on recordings of real voices. Acapela
use a form of concatonative synthesis known as unit selection synthesis.
Essentially, this breaks down the real voice recordings into phones, syllables,
words and phrases and stores them in a database. When text is converted into
speech, the text is analysed and the resulting speech is built from the
building blocks held in the database.
Formative synthesis relies entirely on artificially generated sound. The
upshot is that although concatonative synthesis sounds more real, it is often
less responsive and prone to technical glitches. Formative synthesis sounds
much less real, but tends to be more responsive.
Léonie.
--
http://www.tink.co.uk/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Roy Bannister
Sent: 20 October 2008 09:41
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [access-uk] Acapela Voices.
Thanks to Steve sending a demo disk of Acapela voices I have had a chance to
try odd ones. I normally use Reed from Window-Eyes Eloquence, or Paul on Satogo
Dectalk. I found Peter and Ryan were acceptable for reading text passages at a
reasonable speed, found them slightly jerky with final syllables sometimes
clipped. However when typing using either of them I find them rather sluggish,
also the upper case letters are not announced in a higher pitch, I definitely
don't care for this. I have Skread installed on my machine with Skype, using my
normal voices, the Skread voice will announce details whilst the other voice
may be reading something else, this doesn't happen with the Acapela voices,
they are not trying to use the same voice. My machine is a dual core 2.8Gb
processor with 1Gb of ram, this makes me suspect that the Acapela voices are
memory hungry. I will be interested in other users verdicts.
Cheers
Roy
roy.bannister@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Skype: roybannister4787
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