Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

State of Speech Synthesis and Text-To-Speech?

Posted by Cliff on from the my-computer-still-doesn't-talk-to-me dept.

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.

1 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. got real life? by Nick+Vukovich · · Score: 0, Redundant

    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