Hatrack River Forum: Fun With Voice Synthesis

This is topic Fun With Voice Synthesis in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :

It's pretty slow at work today, and people in my dept. have been entertaining themselves with this.

Posted by Javert Hugo (Member # 3980) on :

Try it with the "best quotes of LOTR" page.

You know they are good lines when they sound good even then. [Smile]

Posted by K.A.M.A. (Member # 6045) on :

Mine's better.

Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :

That's a great idea kat!

Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :

The default voice, the "U.S. English Male" is the same dreadful synth voice they've had for 20+ years. *shudder* But the "U.S. English Female" is pretty good, and I like "British English" voice.

I do wonder why almost all their (available) voices are male, especially since studies show that both men and women tend to listen more attentively to a female voice.

Posted by aspectre (Member # 2222) on :

Cuz men tend to say what they mean, while women tend to emote what they mean [Big Grin]

Posted by eslaine (Member # 5433) on :

Does Kama have a Hatrack nick, or was that her first post here?

Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :

Kama's been around for quite awhile; that's just her first post as an acronym.

IBM has a couple of other voice synthesizers that have more (and better) female voices, but for some reason it wasn't letting me access them yesterday.

Posted by ana kata (Member # 5666) on :

Pretty cool! I like the British one best. These sound much better than the dude who reads the weather on my NOAA station. That guy sounds like he's got a heavy Russian accent. And he has a lot of trouble with local place names, particularly those that are Native American words.

Funny how very hard it is to get computers to do some things that seem really easy to us, isn't it? But you can't read a passage with correct intonation unless you understand what it means. That's all there is to it. And it will be a long time before computers understand what things mean, I think.

Posted by Kama (Member # 3022) on :

Dude, Elaine, check out my registration date, yo.

Posted by K.A.M.A. (Member # 6045) on :

It's simply no longer necessary to keep my real identity a secret, since it's so widely known.

Posted by eslaine (Member # 5433) on :

Yeah, the question became rhetorical after that post. K.A.M.A threw me off, and I thought, wasn't Kama from Hatrack? So I went looking....