I'm no longer blogging on text to speech; however, there are still a lot of great people blogging on speech at Microsoft. Your best contact is going to be Chuck Opperman who has a blog related to TTS and Speech API content: http://blogs.msdn.com/chuckop...

It was only a matter of time.... AgoraNet, Inc. appears to be in the process of introducing the Model Talker system of TTS , allowing an individual to create a TTS engine based on her voice to be used with any Sapi 5.0 compliant system (Windows XP/Vista...

What's the Blizzard Challenge? In a shell's nut, it's a competition that provides researchers and speech labs with the same set of originally recorded waves (i.e., 5 hours of a male speaker), and then challenges teams to create the "best" (i.e., most...

If you are running Vista Beta 2, check out the new text to speech functionality using the Narrator screen reader program. (Narrator is also enabled in Windows XP; however, the Vista TTS voice is way better in terms of naturalness and intelligibility IMO...

Besides being the best of the three MI movies, there were 2 instances of TTS in the movie that deserve some discussion (and clarification). One of the scenes was simple and plausable, while the second was a definite stretch (i.e., not doable by today...

Recently I was talking to a colleague who is a native French speaker (hey, that's the great benefit of working here at Microsoft - lots of non-English speakers around) and she pointed out an interesting occurance of mispronunciation in French TTS that...

Egads, it's quite clear that Shakespeare wasn't meant to be read with a text to speech voice... or at least not with the Micorosoft Mary and Microsoft Mike which are representative of older MS technology (old in terms of what users will get with Vista...

I recently went over the entry in Wikipedia on text-to-speech , and it turns out to be a really good overview of the technolgogy. If you are interested in its history and the various components that would have to be handled by any TTS system, I highly...

Check out Blake's blog here and you can see some of the enthusiasm around text to speech. Blake's site, The Road to Know Where, is loaded with all sorts of tips for Windows users. I'll know where to send my mom the next time she is looking for helpful...

El Mundo is one of the more well known newspapers in Spain. And they are now offering an MP3 podcast download of the daily news . It appears that the voice of Rosa is the very same Rosa of AT&T Natural Voices . I found it interesting that the podcast...

(No, it can't just be me... oh, and it isn't...) Stephen Potter has an extensive list of bloggers across several teams that get a trill out talking Speech. And while I'm the only one focused on TTS (life beyond TTS?), a lot of interest around here is...

This is an interesting, if not challenging problem for TTS systems. So, how should you pronounce "1"? Should an English TTS system simply say "one" when it encounters "1"? (Okay, the answer is "no", and here's why:) Let's look at the following English...

Just when you thought you might be able to use your car commute time to sit back and relax, listen to NPR, and creep slowly across the Seattle bridge... TTS is there to readout that document that you didn't have time to read the night before. Magnetictime...

I recently found an article describing the Deskbot which is one of the cooler text to speech reader programs available IMHO. Oh, and it's free! (BTW, does your TTS engine correctly readout the string "IMHO" as "in my humble opinion"? -- it should). (BTW...

There was an ariticle on web that describes a company with a TTS voice for Hindi. And for all you SAPI devs, the desktop version is SAPI compliant. According the article, "'Vaachak', developed by Prologix Software Solutions , is the first, high-quality...

Truly! Find out how you too can use TTS when watching the Macy's Day Parade to reflect falling debris such as a light post fixture. Egads, it's a good thing the gal was alright. If you read the article, you'll note that the laptop was loaded with Dynavox...

When you look back at what Windows was in 1990 and you look at what Vista is slated to be next year, are you surprised or disappointed at the level of development and sophistication they have achieved? [JimAll] I would say both. I didn't know that...

Anybody out there use a GPS device? Apparently Mobile Crossing has announced some newer features that include the text-to-speech readout of street names. The lower-end model starts at about $550. I wonder how well it actually does across the country with...

Just when you think you are settling into a job, they encourage you to take a month off. Sorry to have not posted anything in October. It was a great time for me to connect with my daughter - and wow, she is amazing. She's not speaking yet - but I think...

Microsoft has a page buried on its website that details a few third party speech component companies. Unfortunately, the page was showing a few companies that are slightly out of date (as of today - although I've requested to the appropriate authorites...

Egads! Check out this video which predicts the future of computing... in particular, the TTS is... well, what better way to put it... just like a real person via a video! (Oh my, I do believe it IS a real person). At any rate, it's quite interesting from...

Here is a brief article on some step by step instructions on the code I recently posted with help from Matt Harrington in regards to outputing TTS to .wav via C#. (Also, our very own Robert Brown wrote up similar instructions with a managed API.)

I realize I'm a little new around here, but I am continually impressed with the caliber of individuals that I work with. It's truly a joy to come to work everyday, surrounded by interesting and bright folks who are really attracted to language and technology...

While browsing the U-Village this weeked with my wife and babe, I begged by wife to let me have a few minutes in the Mac store. (Heck, a man's got to stay on top of the competition, correct?) My real purpose was to get an overview of the iPod so that...

MyNewsToGo is a nice looking RSS newsreader that will also convert your feeds to an MP3. Sounds like a Podcast in the making.