http://www.speechworks.com/products/tts/interact iv edemo.cfm
http://www.nuance.com/products/vocalizer.html
http://www.lhsl.com/realspeak/demo.cfm
For a while, L&H's RealSpeak was considered the best in telephony, but the AT&T matches or beats it. When determining the best TTS to use, it's really hard to tell the capabilities via these demos. When used in an telephony application, there is the ability to semantically mark up the text to make it sound a lot better.
Actually, the speech on the American Airlines system is not TTS. It's prerecorded sentences and phrases. Most of the commerical deployed telephony speech rec systems use prerecorded speech. For parts like the readout of the flight information, they use concatenated prompting, so that you don't have to record:
The flight is departing Boston, MA
The flight is departing New York, NY
etc...
and can instead record:
The flight is departing
and
Boston, MA
New York, NY
etc...
and then just glue them together when you play out the information.
United Airlines (800 824 6200), Continental (800 784 4444) and Airtran (800 247 8726) also have speech rec flight information systems. You can also call TellMe (888 55 8355) and HeyAnita (800 442 6482), which are Yahoo!-like voice portals.
There are a whole bunch of other systems out there; it's quite an interesting field.
Todd
(ObDisclaimer: I work in the speech rec telephony industry.)
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Also...
t iv edemo.cfm
http://www.speechworks.com/products/tts/interac
http://www.nuance.com/products/vocalizer.html
http://www.lhsl.com/realspeak/demo.cfm
For a while, L&H's RealSpeak was considered the best in telephony, but the AT&T matches or beats it. When determining the best TTS to use, it's really hard to tell the capabilities via these demos. When used in an telephony application, there is the ability to semantically mark up the text to make it sound a lot better.
Todd
Actually, the speech on the American Airlines system is not TTS. It's prerecorded sentences and phrases. Most of the commerical deployed telephony speech rec systems use prerecorded speech. For parts like the readout of the flight information, they use concatenated prompting, so that you don't have to record:
The flight is departing Boston, MA
The flight is departing New York, NY
etc...
and can instead record:
The flight is departing
and
Boston, MA
New York, NY
etc...
and then just glue them together when you play out the information.
United Airlines (800 824 6200), Continental (800 784 4444) and Airtran (800 247 8726) also have speech rec flight information systems. You can also call TellMe (888 55 8355) and HeyAnita (800 442 6482), which are Yahoo!-like voice portals.
There are a whole bunch of other systems out there; it's quite an interesting field.
Todd
(ObDisclaimer: I work in the speech rec telephony industry.)
Actually, he reminded me of a young Kevin Bacon...
I think that they're replaying all three parts in order this weekend. Check clicktv.com.