New Text-to-speech voices

[kwing]

Hi,

 

I am new to this forum and was hoping for a bit of help. I have created my IVR system and a backend plugin no probs but I need to use a different voice as microsoft sam is awful. There are even free ones from NCH software available which i have downloaded.

 

http://www.nch.com.au/speech/index.html

 

However when i go into control panel > speech there are no other voices there apart from microsoft sam. I have even downloaded some other software which identifies voices on your PC/server and that cant find any others either!

 

Am i missing something obvious or should these just be visible? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

Kev

[pythonpoole]

After you install a Sapi voice, it should appear in the system control panel. If it doesn't, try restarting.

 

In any case, those synthesized voices are

not going to be much better than Microsoft sam.

 

If you want a natural sounding voice, you should consider purchasing one of the natural voices from realspeak/nuance, loquendo or AT&T for example. Many of the voices can be purchased for about $30 from nextup.com. These 'natural' voices use speech concatenation to form words and sentences rather than using a tone based

synthesizer. So for example, a person records their voice saying 'ap' and 'el'... When you put in apple, the software puts 'ap' and 'el' together to say 'apel'. This sounds considerably better.

[kwing]

Yeah thanks for that. I think it wasnt showing becuase i didnt have sapi5 on the server. Anyway, I have bought a voice (Audrey!) from that website nextup - i was already looking on there when you mentioned it, got it working fine now, just had to give it a re-boot. Thanks for the info.