Text to Voice

[fabricator]

I know ABnet has a jscript based text to voice engine, no idea how this works myself. I'll let someone else talk about that.

Thyme is using a text to voice c++ engine that is part of .NET 3.5.

Also I noticed the other day that BS Contact 7.1 adds a text to voice node. I tried it out though and got nothing.

What is interesting though is all of the above 3 engines sound more realistic than the old bxx voices.

[thyme]

Hi fab
Any of the .NET 3.5 languages have access to windows' built in speech engine.
It takes only about 3 lines of code to play a string of text using .NET whether you use C++, C# or VB (and probably jscript too).
My guess is ABnet and Seamless3d are both using the same speech technology that generates the speech wave form data.
The main difference is ABnet uses server side scripting and Seamless3d uses client side.
With a server side scripting approach, the client downloads the speech wave form from the server. (the client does not use a local TTS engine)
With a client side approach, the client generates the speech wave form from the chat strings using a local TTS engine.

regards
thyme
www.seamless3d.com

[fabricator]

No I know ABnet uses client side TTS engine, I just don't know the finer details as its somewhere in a collection of javascript files.

[thyme]

I would be very surprised to learn ABnet is using a client side TTS engine because in ABnet I hear TTS voices I have not installed.

Also in ABnet I see a "waiting for http:// etc." message in IE's information bar after I enter a chat sentence and the speech does not play until after the download completes.

[vcard]

Hi thyme, Fab,

Yes, we tested several ways: a client side before and voice services now, but are mere tests to play with.

vcard

[thyme]

good work vcard :)

It may be worth finding out about the W3C XML based Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) that is based on Sun's JSGF and/or JSML
SSML is non platform dependent, however I seem to remember finding that IE is one of the few browsers that supports it so if your limited to using IE anyway, it may be more practical to use microsoft specific features designed specially for the SAPI5 TTS engine. It should be possible to access the SAPI5 TTS engine using Firefox (client side) since there is .NET support for Firefox

[fabricator]

I'm still yet to see a link or something on how to use the various TTS engines ABNet2 has been trialing. I tried google but too much rubbish about other languages.

[Russ Kinter]

It seems for DeepMatrix Java there are a couple of options:
FreeTTS which is crossplatform:
http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php

and for the Microsoft TTS:
http://www.quadmore.com/JAVA_to_SAPI/
Actually the quadmore site also has some interesting options using FreeTTS.