text to speech software

Four · 03-17-2009, 09:17 PM

I'm looking for text to speech software and found festival, and espeak, however they sound quality and articulation doesn't sound that great. The voices sound broken. And doesn't seem suitable enough to use to convert an entire book to speech and listen (I tried and the speech isn't that clear).

On Microsoft Windows, there is msagent which does text to speech fairly well. Is it possible to get text to speech on Linux with comparable sound quality.

MS3FGX · 03-17-2009, 10:58 PM

If there is, I am not aware of it. All of the open source text to speech engines I have seen had the same problem you are describing, they work but the quality compared to even Microsoft's offering (to say nothing of Mac OS) is really very poor.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who might know of a better option out there.

almatic · 03-18-2009, 05:48 AM

for the rare cases I need that, I use this : http://cepstral.com/demos/
You can fetch the .wav files out of your browser cache and use them. The demo is not suitable for an entire book of course, but for such an extensive project you might consider to spend some money for a full version ...