September 5, 2001

5:48 AM

At&T New Text to Speech thingy- HAL I'm coming.
posted by kramer_101 (14 comments total)

he he, now i dont have to read my emails
posted by semper at 6:06 AM on September 5, 2001

Hmm. I was thinking prank phone calls. The quality is much nicer than anything I've heard yet, the word flow is more natural and voice tone more accurate. I see Hawking switching over (the real one that is).
posted by samsara at 6:24 AM on September 5, 2001

Wow, cool. Forget the future implications, you can have lots of fun with the free demo. Word.
posted by pardonyou? at 6:35 AM on September 5, 2001

Wow. Having just watched Austin Powers 2, I can definitively state that this thing delivers lines much more naturally and believably than Heather Graham.

'Course, it's still a long way from sounding like an actual human, but it's a start....
posted by Optamystic at 7:10 AM on September 5, 2001

And that's not all. The NWS just threw $600,000 to reinvent their text-to-speech technology. Check out the new voices.
posted by rex at 8:06 AM on September 5, 2001

That's actually about 3-4 years old.
posted by jgooden at 8:59 AM on September 5, 2001

Who cares how old it is? I'm having way too much fun with this!
posted by pardonyou? at 9:08 AM on September 5, 2001

I was going to post this about a month ago but I found a previous reference to this in its infancy by crackheadmatt here.

We did however use this service for evil of course, and left a few prank voice mails with it.
posted by stew560 at 9:09 AM on September 5, 2001

pardonyou: thanks for all the links, but Yahoo requires local referrers.
posted by dhartung at 9:25 AM on September 5, 2001

Bell Labs can make you sound like a gnat or a coffee drinker, but evidently not both.
posted by Skot at 9:35 AM on September 5, 2001

Oops! My bad. Sorry about that -- they were pretty funny, too (at least to me). Well, they're all in my briefcase if anyone still wants to check: http://briefcase.yahoo.com/jmpeterson70.
posted by pardonyou? at 9:39 AM on September 5, 2001

The sugarhill gang might be out of business when they hear this rendition of Rapper's Delight.
posted by mathowie at 11:29 AM on September 5, 2001

that 'text to voice demo' wave file rocks
posted by juv3nal at 6:00 PM on September 5, 2001

To AT&T,

I find the results of your experiment mixed at best. While your attempt to write a program which accurate imitates the award-winning speech patterns of actor Christopher Walken was spot-on, your attempt to mimic the sound of his voice was awful. Back to the drawing board!
posted by Hildago at 6:42 PM on September 5, 2001