Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
So someone summarize please. What is the best text to speech program for Windows and what is/are the best voice(s)?
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You can't make a blanket statement that one vendor's voices are better than another, because individual voices from each vendor sound better or worse than voices from other vendors. You have to listen to each voice from each vendor and decide what you like. To facilitate that, here are the web pages from each vendor, where you can enter your own text and hear what the voices sound like.
http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
http://www.neospeech.com/demo/demo_text.php
http://www.acapela-group.com/demos/demos.asp
http://212.8.184.250/tts/demo_login.jsp
http://cepstral.com/demos/
I'll give you my opinion, but only you can decide which sounds best to you. I think the NeoSpeech voices are better sounding than the AT&T Voices, even though I bought some of each. Lots of people like some of the new voices from Acapela and RealSpeak. I admit that they generally have better inflection, but sometimes, even that inflection sounds funny. Also, I think that these vendors voices have too much silibance. Again, my opinion.
One other issue is how accurately each voice pronounces words. In my testing, I found that the AT&T and NeoSpeech voices were the most accurate with pronounciation.
As to which TTS software to use, I tried several and again, offer my opinion. If you want a free program, DSpeech is very good. For a commercial program, I would recommend TextAloud from Nextup.com. It has several features that the free programs (and many commercial ones) don't have.
As for actually buying voices, the only place that I have found that has a wide selection and a good price, all in one location is again, Nextup.com. One important caution - the Acapela voices sold by Nextup.com only work with their software, as required by license. I know the AT&T and NeoSpeech voices work with any TTS software. I'm not sure about the others.
If you really want a recommendation, I would say you couldn't go wrong buying the NeoSpeech Kate and Paul voices and TextAloud. The only drawback with NeoSpeech is that they don't offer a wide selection of other voices. Their non-English voices are all oriental.