AT&T?

[Phil Davis]

Welcome, SS!

SupermanSlyr at aol.com wrote:
> Hey everyone, I would like to start by thanking all of you for your  time. 
> All the information you have given me has helped make my adjustment  to 
> Revolution a lot easier. So for that you all have my thanks. Revolution  seems to have 
> a lot of possibilities as far as deciding what project to  undertake. Which 
> brings me to a specific question I was wondering about. How do  you use better 
> voices with your programs besides using  Microsoft's built in text to speech 
> engine? 

I haven't worked with any Windows voices that *don't* use the MS SAPI 
engine, but you don't have to go far to get MUCH better results than you 
get with standard WIN or Mac voices. (I personally think it's mostly the 
quality of the voices, rather than the capability of the speech engines, 
that makes out-of-the-box speech sound so poor on either platform.)


> I've seen AT&T's, but I'm sure if I use anything like that, or  anything else 
> for that matter; I'll have to pay a bundle for  licensing to use that engine 
> wont I? Or is there  other options to take?  Would it even be possible to use
> better  sounding voices with Revolution? I've seen a lot of really realistic 
> test 2  speech online sites. Like that 
> "Site pal" thing or something like that(?).

Yes, you can use 3rd party voices with Rev. Actually, the real question 
is whether or not they'll work with SAPI (on Win at least). In my 
experience, Rev has been able to play any SAPI-compliant voice. Fees 
vary widely, starting at around $30 USD for personal-use licensing of 
good-quality downloadable voices at cepstral.com.


>  I've even seen a lot of programs using the AT&T voices too. And  that site 
> pal place charges a membership fee so you can use t on your site. But  I just 
> want the user to understand what the computer says. At this point it  just kind 
> of sounds like Choobaca from Star Wars....
>  
> Any help is always appreciated.

Here's a starting point for more TTS voice sources:
http://mail.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/2005-September/066571.html


Phil Davis