[bksvol-discuss] Re: ATT Natural Voices
- From: "Sarah Van Oosterwijck" <curiousentity@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:56:11 -0600
In my experience the little recordings you can download as samples of a TTS
always sound better than what you can actually produce. It is best to
search for demo web sites that actually let you type in text and then have
it spoken with the voice you choose. I thought that I might want to buy the
AT&T natural voices when I listened to something prerecorded, but when I
found a website that allowed me to test them I was not so impressed. I have
the same problem with not being able to tollerate choppy speech that makes
it sound like many words are made up of disassociated syllables.
At least AT&T's voices don't sound overly emotional as Neo Speech Paul and
Kate do. They also no better than to pronounce things without vowels. I
don't really like hearing about the .berf files on my computer--sounds too
much like barf. lol
They also seem to know how to deal with punctuation very well.
So far my opinion is still, "Long live synthesized speech!" And spare the
human readers that must work for hours to provide voice samples to make
modern TTS voices.
I could sware that AT&T Rich is actually made with the voice of one of the
British readers for NLS, but I can't think of his name in order to ask all
of you if you know what I mean.
Sarah Van Oosterwijck
http://home.earthlink.net/~netentity/
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