Text to speech engines for Windows

[Phil Davis]

Hi Bob -

I've used SAPI 4 & 5 to enable Rev speech synthesis on Windows, and 
haven't found any problems on the surface. I'm not doing anything too 
fancy with speech, just speaking unmodified English text so far.

As you may have already discovered, there are third-party voices 
available whose quality completely eclipses MS and Apple voices. I don't 
know a lot about the licensing details as I'm just at the beginning of 
the selection process myself, but there are some good ones out there.

Here's a quick one I've tried:
http://cepstral.com/
They have downloadable voices for Mac. Windows, Linux. Languages include 
  English, Americas Spanish, Canadian French, Italian, and others.


Here's a list of other resources. Some have products that support 
text-to-speech (TTS) in phone sytems, others support TTS in cars, some 
support it in computers:
www.brightspeech.com
www.slt.atr.jp/ss-e
www.naturalvoices.att.com
www.cepstral.com
fonix.com
www.research.ibm.com/tts
www.iflytek.com/English/products.htm
www.infotalkcorp.com
www.loqundo.com
www.nuance.com
www.scansoft.com
www.svox.com
www.toshiba.co.jp/rdc/mmlab/tech/w21e.htm

HTH -
Phil Davis


Bob Earp wrote:
> What's the best English text to speech engine for Windows?  I see there 
> are ones from Microsoft, WinSpeech, Lernout & Hauspie, AT&T, and maybe 
> others.
> 
> Are there others for Spanish, Portuguese and French ?
> 
> Also, through searching I see references to SAPI 4.0, SAPI 5.0 and SAPI 
> 5.1 (I assume) standards for these engines.  Are there any problems 
> associated with a particular version and a release of Windows ?
> 
> Tnx, Bob...
> 
> Bob Earp - White Rock, BC