[dba-Tech] Text to speech

In 1974 as a graduate student I worked on a DARPA project to convert text to
speech.  We were working with one of the earliest voice synthesizers -
Votrax from the Vocal Division of the Federal Screw Works
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Votrax.

It was phoneme based and didn't have a bad voice.  Very computer like but
understandable.  I'm surprised at how little progress has been made in this
natural speech area.

Rocky




-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Dan Waters
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 9:14 AM
To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues'
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Text to speech

Hi Shamil,

I remember that Excel has a text-to-speech function - at least it did a few
years ago.  The voice was not very natural, but it is free and readily
available.  I always thought it would be fun to provide voice dialog boxes,
but it turns out that many of my users don't have speakers or a sound card.

Good Luck!
Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Salakhetdinov
Shamil
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 8:22 AM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: [dba-Tech] Text to speech

Hi All --

I'd like to make conversion of a set of transcript texts to speech.
Here is the site

http://www.text2speech.org/

which makes rather satisfactory conversion, still I'd like to:

- have an option to define pronunciation/aliasing pronunciation of some
(key)words, e.g. the referred above site does result in 'C#" pronounced as
'c hash" and I'd like it to be pronounced as 'c sharp';
- have more "human being alike" voice - the 'American Male 2' voice from
http://www.text2speech.org/ does sound not bad still it's sounding too
artificial and I hope there could be more natural generated voice options
available somewhere.

Free solution preferred but I'd pay for it if it wouldn't be too
expensive...

Thank you.

-- Shamil 
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