Newsgroups: comp.speech
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From: jhaseler@cix.compulink.co.uk ("John Haseler")
Subject: Re: What is state of the art in speech synthesis?
Message-ID: <D6J9sM.8x0@cix.compulink.co.uk>
Organization: Compulink Information eXchange
References: <3liv51$n5@granite.sentex.net>
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 1995 23:12:21 GMT
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I have been using ProVoice for Windows, from Creative Technology 
(connected with First Byte and SoundBlaster).  That is pretty good, and 
easy to use. It does text to speech and has a large exception dictionary. 
 However getting really natural sounds needs a pretty deep understanding 
of the meaning of the words, in my opinion, or a human with that 
understanding hand-tuning it.

I know that the system works quite hard to blend one phone with another, 
that it works basically on phone (consonant-vowel) pairs, and that it can 
adjust the length of phones a factor of perhaps 3 either way while still 
sounding quite realistic.  You may find 'Monologue for Windows' with a 
Soundblaster - this is basically the same, but (I guess) a first version 
- the programming interface is awful, though the sound is still quite 
good.

They advertise different language capabilities as well (French, Spanish 
soon I think).  However unless you can find a way round it, the cost is 
$600, which may well put many people off - mine came through work.

John Haseler
