Text to Speech

May 7, 2005 7:18 PM

AT&T Text to Spech put out by AT&T labs is interesting to play around with. Select your language and accent and then go wild. You can even translate if you select the right accent.
posted by tozturk (32 comments total)

this is like five years old.
posted by blacklite at 7:22 PM on May 7, 2005

Our Amiga computer could do simple text-to-speech over 20 years ago. I wasn't expecting much progress, but it does sound like they're finally close to natural-sounding speech.
posted by evilcolonel at 7:22 PM on May 7, 2005

Cool post. Thank you.

My mac from 1984 could do some pretty decent text to speech. It is amazing it has taken them this long to improve a bit.
posted by EmoChild at 7:24 PM on May 7, 2005

[this is old]
posted by rxrfrx at 7:28 PM on May 7, 2005

.
posted by felix betachat at 7:28 PM on May 7, 2005

Don't let the lawn guarders get you down this is wicked cool. Thanks tozturk.
posted by Mitheral at 7:46 PM on May 7, 2005

Double post.
posted by banished at 7:52 PM on May 7, 2005

it has a spech impeedamint.
posted by quonsar at 7:58 PM on May 7, 2005

Deleted thread sing-a-long!
posted by Eideteker at 8:01 PM on May 7, 2005

since this will be deleted anyway...
posted by felix betachat at 8:04 PM on May 7, 2005

felix - lol <-- and i never, ever use that term.
posted by socratic at 8:05 PM on May 7, 2005

Actually, banished, the post you linked to was a triple post already. It was also posted on Sep 5 2001 and June 4 2001.

I am sad that felix's links don't work for me.
posted by blacklite at 8:16 PM on May 7, 2005

I would recommend testing it with:
fhqwhgads
posted by toftflin at 8:17 PM on May 7, 2005

It's really fun to make the female voices say dirty stuff.
posted by jonmc at 8:25 PM on May 7, 2005

It's really fun to make the female voices say dirty stuff.

I like Audrey, the British lady.
posted by marxchivist at 8:27 PM on May 7, 2005

They all sound like they're reciting beat poetry.
posted by kalimac at 8:29 PM on May 7, 2005

last time I saw this it didn't have the german/french/spanish voices. Pretty cool.
thanks.
posted by tomplus2 at 8:33 PM on May 7, 2005

How about the one where they typed in certain words to make the At&t bot speak with an accent! oh good times.
posted by andendau at 8:34 PM on May 7, 2005

blacklite... I was aware of the Sept. 5th post, which is why when I said double post I was being witty. There was double meaning there. I didn't catch the June 4th post though... but the fact that it is Lucent Technologies and not specifically AT@T gets me off on a technicality and leaves my wit intact I think.
posted by banished at 8:58 PM on May 7, 2005

Endless puerile fun.
posted by blendor at 9:00 PM on May 7, 2005

fhqwhgads

Everybody to the limit!!!!
posted by WolfDaddy at 9:17 PM on May 7, 2005

Does anyone remember that online skit done in all-synthesized voices? Something about micromanagement and bosses, I seem to recall. Got a link?
posted by greatgefilte at 9:52 PM on May 7, 2005

a triple double post? oh shit, doesn't that mean someone has to get castrated?

And this would be cooler if you could give it an RSS feed or large blocks of text to convert. Then blogs could be auto podcast.
posted by fenriq at 10:16 PM on May 7, 2005

I'm sure the shears are heating up in a good strong flame already, fenriq.

(oh man, I just scared myself with that mental image.)
posted by blacklite at 10:18 PM on May 7, 2005

I tried plugging in Bob Burn's 'Ode to a Haggis' with the male UK accent and was sorely, sorely, verily, & extremely, disappointed.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 10:24 PM on May 7, 2005

Amigas, Macs, fooey.

I heard decent text to speech from a TI 99/4A in 1981/2. So neener.

Also, I was *the master* of Dungeons of Daggorath. a r a r a r a r a r a r a r
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:13 PM on May 7, 2005

I've never seen this before.. thanks, tozturk.
posted by BoringPostcards at 11:26 PM on May 7, 2005

See the Wikipedia article on Speech synthesis for information about how this works, and browse the external links for some more modern TTS engines that sound more natural than AT&T's "Natural Voices", which they haven't spent any development on since about 2001. Be sure to check out Rhetorical's rVoice, Speechworks' RealSpeak, and Nuance's Vocalizer. They all sound much better than AT&T Natural Voices.
posted by nohat at 12:50 AM on May 8, 2005

Anyone know of a tool like this that produces speech like that of Joshua in WarGames?
posted by Mitheral at 7:43 AM on May 8, 2005

Don't think of it as a Triple Double Post, just think of it as "A Classic MeFi Encore".
posted by wendell at 12:18 PM on May 8, 2005

So it's a double, triple, quadruple, etc. post. Who gives a rats ass? It's fun to screw around with if you haven't thought of it in ages.
posted by damnitkage at 7:16 PM on May 8, 2005

It's really fun to make the female voices say dirty stuff.

Especially in the middle of class back in 8th grade.
posted by ttopher at 9:27 AM on May 9, 2005