[sdiy] speech synthesis demo site

[Charles Bisaillon]

If only you knew the power of Macintosh, you¹d be literally laughing you
pants off.

I have downloaded a small freeware or shareware (can¹t remember) application
call ³voice box². It uses the internal Macintosh voicing system, which means
that the thing sounds darn good. The system has been introduced close to 15
years ago on the old macs (made cpu history), and improved since then. You
have a choice of 20 or something voices, some good, some crappy and some
musical (playing melodies as they speak). The cool thing about it is that
you can change the pitch, the rate and also save it as a .wav file.

I actually used a bunch of files once to build a vocal track in a tune. I
exported as .wav short words, like for example ³you², ³the², ³baby², ³all²,
³platypus², etc. until I had 50 or so, then I patched together sentences
(somewhat like W.S. Burrough) and synchronized it to the beat. After
smoothing out the edges with some outboard gear and plug-ins, nobody that
heard the track would have guessed that the diva was actually ³Vicky², mac¹s
most natural sounding voice.

Charles





> I'm having WAY too much fun with this, and I thought I'd share
>  
> http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html
>  
> Just type in a sentence or two or three (300 word limit) and hit 'play.' One
> neat thing: you can also download the resulting WAV file. Mucho possibilities
> for mangling and sampling. Also, try the different voices. There are four or
> five different voices for English, and some sound more natural, some more
> 'robotic.' You can also type in German, French, or Spanish and get that read
> back in a native sounding voice.
>  
> Tips: 1) a comma (,) inserts a brief pause (good for those dramatic moments).
> 2) Several of the same letters in a row can sort of get the thing to sing. Try
> 'aaarrrraaarrrr'. 3) Some nonsense words just get spelled out. 'Laka' gets
> spelled out, but 'lacka' gets pronounced as a single word (this is important
> when you're trying to get it to say 'boom shaka lacka lacka, baby'.)
>  
> BTW, this thing is a pretty darned good speech synthesis program. Kudos to the
> programmers. But it's also a ton of fun to mess with. ;) I almost laughed
> myself sick by typing in the words to "Do that to me one more time" by Captain
> & Tenille. Okay, so I'm weird.
>  

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