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Samples of Text to Speech

Apropos of my last post, here’s an sample of the same paragraph, part of an earlier post here, rendered in various text-to-speech systems. All samples have been converted to MP3 files (using iTunes) for ease of comparison:

To my ears, the IBM female voice is the best sounds — it has a certain melodic quality that’s quite pleasant. The AT&T speakers are very good too, if a little over-zealous. Winbond can’t really be faulted for its poor quality — it’s a “TTS on a chip” system, not a general purpose software system.

Sunday, October 5, 2003 - 6:38pm

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Erin's picture
Erin on October 6, 2003
The “Festival Demo” voice is the one which sounds the most like what I imagined a computerized voice would sound like — like Stephen Hawkin’s. It also reminds me so much of the “Fitter Happier” track from Radiohead’s OK Computer record — eerie, actually. Most of the other samples sound quite natural, all considering.

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