Slashdot Mirror
State of Speech Synthesis and Text-To-Speech?
Gnulix asks: "Are there any, preferably either open source products available that produce realistic speech from an arbitrary (English) text? Projects such as Festival doesn't sound all that much better than SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) did on a Commodore 64 back in 1979, nor does SoftVoice's or IBM's new products sound very good. I mean we all know that Stephen Hawking is a fun loving guy, but I bet you that he didn't choose his unrealistic, robotic voice just for the heck of it. With all the amazing advances we have seen in real-time graphics, shouldn't speech synthesis have come much, much further than what is, seemingly, available today?" Ask Slashdot last handled the Voice-To-Text issue in January of this year.
is the best Text to speech conversion program
checkout http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/
How does "voice to text" relate to "text to voice" ?
Look at the older article, it's a completely different question.
-Gary
Train Chimps to do the job.
They have the added bonus of being able to get a cold drink from your fridge.
Actually, I heard that they offered Hawking a revamped speech synthesizer, since although his was state-of-the-art in the seventies, today we have much better. He declined, saying he and his friends had gotten used to the voice, and it was "his". In fact, whenever on hears that particular flavor of voice synthesis, it's difficult not to think of Hawking.
He does relate, however, in A Brief History of Time, that at first people had trouble understanding "his voice", so that when he would speak or answer questions at lectures, he would have an interpreter who was more familiar with his voice repeat what he just said.
Interesting stuff...
Are there any, preferably either open source products available that produce realistic speech from an arbitrary (English) text?
If it existed it'd be in government (though the Bush model is obviously a pre alpha leak..)
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
AT&T Labs Research has some recent work in TTS. I'm not sure how state-of-the-art it is, but its certainly much better than the TTS refered to.
Natoinal Weather Service describes their new system.
Yeah, closed source :)
MS has had text-to-speech as a object you can embed in your program with one line of VB code (same as you can embed IE) for a while now.
Apple has had text to speech entensions in tons of different voices for a long time. Some of the G4s used to read dialog boxes to you by default if you didn't click on them fast enough. Pretty unnerving the first couple times.
Several voice activated automated attendant systems I have called for my credit card and bank are amazing these days. They have insanely accurate speech recognition and really good text-to-speech.
So I wouldn't say the field is not advancing... it is.
Of course, a Google search for "open source text to speech" without quotes yields many promising looking hits, which I havn't evaluated. Why didn't you search there before asking Slashdot?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Nor, to harp on my pet peeve, do we have a theory of semantics that can put XML to any important use on the average webpage. These all need a model of the human psyche, because all human language is flavored with metaphors from the realm of motives and plans, etc (the psychological realm). Psychological science isn't delivering the sorts of models that NLP-etc need, and probably won't for many decades yet. [My AI FAQ]
And the best I have found so far is Festival with Mbrola voices (although not perfect they are far superior than the Festival voices)
For voice control stuff I found a little program called cvoicecontrol to be quite nice.
Hitler's in the fridge.
Lyrics to "All My Shootin's Be Drivebys"
Trash Talk
Ah yeah, that's right motherfuckers!
I'm back riding a funky track.
I got a story to tell you all,
So listen up!
Yo! Trip on this!
Verse 1
I'm rolling through the hood on a Saturday night,
got a 40 in my left hand, my dick in my right,
some chronic in my lap, a pager in my cap,
and a 9 millimeter in the small of my back.
I'm just chilling no place to be,
I take another pull off my 40 z.
I'm thinking 'bout spinning a fat ass tree,
a B to the L to the U-N-T.
Then I get a call on my dope cell phone,
check the caller ID, what up homes?
Yo, it's the Doom and his news ain't good:
"little Pookie got capped last night in the hood."
I feel like the world is fading away,
I saw Little Pookie just the other day.
Pookie was my boy we shared Kool-aid in the park,
now some punks took his life in the dark.
I ask Doomsday who the motherfuckers be,
"some punk ass bitches from MIT."
The fucking Institute, man I should've known,
I say meet me at my crib and hang up the phone.
Playtimes over I got a job to do,
and the world will be less crowded by the time I'm through,
and I'll keep rolling while bullets fly,
cause all my shootings be drivebys.
Verse 2
One minute to midnight we hit the street,
cold as a cadaver, hard as concrete.
Doomsday's packing a baby Mac,
got my AK-47 and the nine in my back.
The Alpine's glowing, P-E's flowing,
got my swerve on tight and my game face showing.
Them damn punks are gonna pay,
the Hawks on the case a bird of prey.
Then up ahead cold chilling in the street,
six motherfuckers from MIT.
I flick off the safety, check my grip,
and load a dum-dum clip.
I glance at the Doom to make sure he's packed,
his fingers on the trigger of his baby Mac.
Time to give a Newtonian demonstration,
of a bullet its mass and its acceleration.
Nine on my lap AK in my hand,
I roll up slow like a snake in the sand.
I wait till I'm sure they can see my face,
then I bust out slugs to the beat of the bass.
The streets sketched out in the full moon light,
MIT punks dying left and right.
There's nowhere to run don't even try,
cause all my shootings be drivebys.
...
Just check THIS out:
http://www.naturalvoices.com/
quite a big step in the right direction in my opinion.
Yes, IHBT. But I just found it amusing how quickly the fatal flaw of this argument popped up.
It stands to reason that the core Linux(TM) kernel, the version distributed by Linus at http://www.kernel.org, cannot meet these minimum requirements, because if it did, all versions of Linux(TM) would meet these minimum requirements. After all, other Linux distributions are not going to be made less secure. (emphasis mine)
Oh, really now? So you mean, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make a distribution that included "rootkitd" that listens on a port for a script kiddie to upload his rootkit to? Or would you suggest that this would not invalidate CC EAL4?
In either case, it's a pretty laughable little paragraph that destroys the rest of this troll. Oh well, better luck next time!
Random and weird software I've written.
With all the amazing advances we have seen in real-time graphics, shouldn't speech synthesis have come much, much further than what is, seemingly, available today?
We haven't had that many amazing advances in graphics. Natural speech is to advanced raytracing what current text to speech is to current graphics. We still cannot raytrace in a single system in real time at the resolution of our eyes, and we still cannot produce natural speech in a single system in real time at the resolution of our ears.
Furthermore, we know less about the math of speech than we know about the math of light. Go visit your local university that has a good CS program, and browse the bookstore for the books used to teach speech recognition. In that book you will find that the average sound a human makes goes from production of complex, multitonal sound from the vocal cords through as many as five complex natural filters (body cavities between the vocal cords and lips) before it reaches the ears of the recipient.
Modeling these filters for one sound is hard enough. Each letter in our alphabet, except simple vowels, changes the filters throughout the letter. Furthermore the filters for a given letter may also change depending on the previous and next letter.
A system to create speech, therefore, must generate hundreds (perhaps thousands) of different filtered 'noises' just to reproduce the english language. Other languages can be much more complex.
Current common technology is to simply record the hundreds of 'simple' sounds and add them together. Really good programs use hundreds of hours of speech by voice actors to get several hundred sounds.
The penultimate is to mathematically recreate every part of the human vocal system from the lungs to the lips. This has obviously not occured. The computers may well be powerful enough, but the understanding of the vocal tract is extremely limited.
In other words, wait 5-10 years. There still isn't a killer application for text to speech, but with devices getting smaller and smaller, there will be soon enough.
-Adam
Another extremely strong competetor to Natural Voices is Speechwork's Speechify. Take the "Speechify Challenge" -- it's still possible to tell which is a real recording and which is the computer, but it is very difficult. Some say it's the best engine available, but I guess that's a matter of personal preference.
I don't know about Open Source TTS, but the commercial versions (AT&T, Speechworks, and others) are sitting on the threshold of truly natural speech. I work in the speech industry, so I follow progress and have seen some of the unreleased demos of upcoming versions. In the next couple years, we can expect amazing things. It won't be long before the Speechify Challenge will truly be impossible to beat.
By the way, for those of you who don't know, the newest and best-sounding engines don't use purely synthesized sounds as older and small-footprint engines do (Festival and Steven Hawking). The engines are built using actual recordings: a "voice actor" will sit in a studio and record dozens of hours of speech, and then, over the course of several months, the recordings are then cut and spliced into individual phonyms, which are reassembled by the engine. This means that the voices actually sound like real people, and the only unrealistic part is the inflection when generating complete sentences. You can order custom voices (for several tens of thousands of dollars) and get a voice that sounds identical to that of your celebrity of choice.
One addendum: the fact that the newest engines use real recordings is exactly the reason why it will be nearly impossible for Open Source engines to approach the quality of commercial versions. The amount of work involved in extracting the raw sounds from recordings is staggering, and it requires full-time commitment from trained experts over the course of many months (not to mention the cost of hiring voice talent). There is no way to avoid the costs involved, and so Open Source alternatives cannot become available without some sort of large grant. Unfortunate.
Here at work we monitor progress of and/or use the following:
DECTalk (One of the most widely used)
Eloquent (http://www.eloq.com - dead URL?) (fairly natural-sounding with dialects)
Elan (European languages)
They've all been improving over the years.
On a related note, check out VXML (google for it, I'm too lazy to link). If you want to tinker, you can set up an account with http://cafe.bevocal.com . It's pretty nifty, since they provide a free 800 number for testing. All you do is call up, speak a pin, and it loads up your app for testing.
Michael C. Hollinger
..but the Commodore 64 wasnt even released in 1979. It didnt come out till late '82 if my memory serves me correctly.
Either that, or you could record hours and hours of the same radio announcer or news reporter, and splice *that*...
Computer dictation software can never be as good as human beings speak. People talk in calm sentences. --Spoken sentences-- These sentences are not only structured and made up by the words, they are pronounced. The overall tone of the sentence is received and comprehended. In other words, pure communication is defined in the "way" people talk. For example, when people ask questions, their sentence flow rises as they talk and the listener can predict a question coming. Can this be done with software? Can computers ever amount to this status of artificial intelligence? --like the computers Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: a space odyssey?
-nick
Well, if you want to spend months of your life doing nothing but that... I like Open Source, but I don't know many people who are that dedicated.
Hrm... Well then, I guess I'll just have to volunteer to be the voice talent for any OS speech projects:) I've always wanted to be the annoying repetitive voice on the other end of the phone!
Yeah. It is pretty much impossible. Like making your own viable operating system as open source. The hundreds of thousands of man-hours and expertise required is impossible.
...as long as they don't put that technology back into coke machines again.
Okay, so I just made fun of you. Actually, I still agree with what you said. It would take a LOT of talent which is really interested in text-to-speach for this to happen. But really, I think the pay-offs to society would be time and energy very well spent.
I just wanted to comment that the speechify voices sound very good ... word for word ... but the inflections between words and the word spacing still needs a lot of work. The "speechify challenge" prerecorded samples havae undoubtadely undergone quite a bit of hinting. I do have to say though, that they do japanese 10,000% better than they do english. Their japanese TTS is the best TTS I have heard EVER.
The problem is that programming is a creative work that is in many ways its own reward. The tedious work of sampling and re-sampling hours of voice, and then splicing it properly for a computer to parse is akin to washing dishes in terms of creativity. I don't foresee someone going through the effort unless they have some other reward involved (like a grant, or its on the company's dime already and they're willing to share).
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
You took the words right out of my mouth! Yes, it's not that it's too much work, but that the work would be so tiresome that no sane person would do it unless they were getting paid.
Now, if someone wants to go and prove me wrong, then go for it! You will do the Open Source community a great service. Of course, there's more to the TTS than splicing recordings, so good luck with that too. Anyway, I hope I am wrong, but I'll believe it when I see it.
- dyphone-based synthesis where the database contains one dyphone (end of first sound + start of next sound) for each psossible sound combination. This approach is used in Festival. Dyphone-based synthesis will hardly sound better that in Festival because dyphones have to be modified artificially to fit every variation of pitch, duration and any other parameter that is needed to produce a given phrase.
- corpus-based synthesis takes a different approach where a large database of several hours of speech is recorded and manually labelled to mark the start and end of each sound. Such a database is used to extract the best and the longest sequence of dyphones during the production. This approach gives naturally sounding results for short sentences where intonation is not so important
Given that the cost of developing a database for corpus synthesis may easily be 100 times higher than for dyphone synthesis, there are very few companies that make them. Two companies offer a demo on the internet: ATT and Scansoft (former L&H) andIn particular, there is one high-res female voice in MBrola that is very good. If you need any help setting it up (I can happiyl give you my festival config file) just say mail me at netgrok @at@ yahoo . de
That said, I think text output is very underrated technology and is quite useful, if used in moderation for the right purposes. One sometimes reads overexcited hyping about reading your emails out loud in the car or at breakfast, but that ain't gonna happen with current technology.
For one, the synthesis is bit monotonous for long texts (but then, now that I think about it, having you SO or kids read out a letter out loud would probably be not any better...)
Secondly, you do not necessarily want a user interface where a computer reads out things the whole time (logs, for instance) because a) its annoying and b) it will not work in an office with multiple people.
Where it DOES work and is trivial to implement is for things that are singular events that occur during the day or alarms. Similar to the sort of PA announcements that you would get in a department store. They do not read loud the whole time, do they?
In our case we use festival with Mbrola for two things:
The backup will start at 4 this afternoon" is the announcement I just heard. Sometimes I add "Please insert the tape, pleeeeease", just to hear the damn computer beg ME for a change
Also, if I FORGET to insert the tape the computer starts moaning continously about it. Nothing like a whining b.tch to convince you get off your butt to put the tape in
It is also trivial to insert this into a standard sysv start/stop script at boot time so that you have some tag when critical servers are shut down for some reason.
Costs for this setup? 2 hours of install time (installing MBrola on festival took some digging-through-the-docs. If you need it, mail me). Writing a script that "say x" instead of "echo x) took about 2 minutes. And putting these commands into the cron job took about 10. So for a bout 3 hours worth of time and set of very cheapo computer speakers you get a good useful functional system which works, and the voice is very, very good. This is pretty neat for critical or semi-critical announcement kind of events, not continuous interaction.
Since the only command I use to activate it is "say x" from unix shellscripts with your current setup is trivial.
Btw, the MBrola website has a demo of a german voice reading a weather and traffic report which is even better than the English one.
Of yeah, it was fun to watch the cleaning lady almost get a heart attack when the computer greeted her...
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Winbond makes a TTS (WTS701EM/T) chip that is relatively cheap (about $15 itself I think).
n thesizer_SP032006.htm
3 .h tml
Devantech (a small company in england that makes boards for robot builders) has built a little board around it, that can have 30 canned phrases and do text to speach over rs-232 or i2c. Info on their board can be found at http://www.robot-electronics.co.uk/shop/Speech_Sy
The board goes goes about $83 from US distributors
http://www.acroname.com/robotics/parts/R184-SP0
While this might be a bit expensive, this guy is makeing small quantities, and this is designed to be run from a small robot driven by a micro controller, not a full computer.
I think Mandrake (the person not the company) was working with a fairly decent open source speech synthesiser(sp?) last time we talked... been about 2 years now I think... but a quick check of his site shows that he's still working with the same company and thus probably still has good links from him homepage, ie http://www.mandrake.net/
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
The trouble is is that disciplines aren't working closely enough together.
Yes, this operation is pretty boring, but so is putting together gui installers, or building unit tests, or writing API documentation -- boring, but important. Interestingly, there are a large number of undergrad/grad Linguistics students who do this sort of thing in college laboratories all the time. They're not CS students, though -- their Linguistics (or Psychology, or Cognitive Science, or whatever wacky department their field was attached to) students.
Someone with a CS professorship, an `open science' bent, and enough funding for 2-3 undergrads (probably $10k each, once you include `overhead') needs to find his or her local Linguistics department and make the world a better place.
Please?
Actually if you documented your rootkit and listed it as a feature you probably could CC EAL4.
I hope to have my EAL4 certified clay brick later this year.
I have been looking for a solution for a while.
It's actually a bit distressing to me that someone somewhere hasn't come up with something that they would distribute free, out of the goodness of their heart. At least maybe a limited-feature release of their commercial product.
I know several people that are blind and who rely on voice synthesizers... and they have to live with the horrible speech of the standard Windows voice.
These people are on disability and can't afford hundreds or thousands of dollars for this... in addition, they need the software to be simple and to run in Windows.
One woman, for example, had never even touched a computer until after she had her eyes removed when she was in her sixties. Her entire experience with computers is based on learning to use windows with only horrible speech synthesis to guide her (you have to give her credit for that!)
For someone like that, any text to speech software has to be very simple to install and use, must run in windows, and the change must be as transparent as possible... anything else would be like blinding her all over again.
You would think that with all of the many millions of sightless people out there, many of them dirt poor, someone, say MS, AT&T or whomever would provide a simple and free system like this as a public service. Such a thing could dramtically improve the lives of so many, it would be great PR, and great advertising for their enterprise versions of the software!
This space available.
Right - cuz after all there aren't any sounds of any kind for free games. Nobody would EVER donate their time for a project.
Oops - sorry. That was sarcastic, wasn't it?
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
Read my other replies to this thread. It's not that it's technically impossible, but that no one in their right mind would want to do it :)
If you want to prove me wrong, then more power to you!