June 2005 - Posts

• How would you like 24 FREE text-to-speech voices as soon as you can download them? But wait... there's a catch!!

  NextUp software offers some apps that allow you to read different kinds of documents and text windows (PDF, docs, clipboard, etc.). While checking out their site, I noticed that they are offering for immediate download all of the older Lernout & Hauspie Read More... Posted Thursday, June 30, 2005 1:36 AM by jaywaltm | 0 Comments

• Military wants speech to speech capabilities

  Okay, so the military really wants speech to speech capabilities ... just think of the possibilities for TTS! Egads, just think of the complexities for TTS and speech recognition, actually. Sombody better let those folks know that it's going to take more Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 3:27 PM by jaywaltm | 0 Comments

• Text-to-speech overivew in Scientific American

  Scientific American recently posted an article overview of text-to-speech . I know that other bloggers have been mentioning it, but since I'm a TTS-centric blogger, I thought that I should put in a plug for it here. One of the interesting question raised Read More... Posted Friday, June 17, 2005 12:22 PM by jaywaltm | 2 Comments

• Yahoo's speech groups are migrating

  Thanks to Jen Anderson for pointing out that the yahoo speech groups are now migrating off of Yahoo and onto their own site at http://www.speechcomputing.com/ . Looks like a lot of good information on speech recognition, including forums and blogs. Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005 12:08 PM by jaywaltm | 0 Comments

• Text-to-speech - coming to a Sony PSP near you

  Do you dabble with Sony's Play Station Portable (PSP)? Even the PSP thinks that text-to-speech is cool . I'll have to ask my brother-in-law about it (he's a hard core gamer teen). Read More... Posted Monday, June 13, 2005 2:05 PM by jaywaltm | 0 Comments

• Text-to-Speech for ATMs

  Here's an interesting article on the importance of text-to-speech for use in ATMs to benefit the visually impaired. Someday, I'd imagine, having TTS interfaces are going to be a requirement, just like having ramps for new building entrances. Read More... Posted Thursday, June 09, 2005 1:23 PM by jaywaltm | 0 Comments

• 3rd party text-to-speech software - Adding effects to TTS

  There are a whole bunch of text-to-speech programs out there for your PC, and one that I recently demos is called A1 SpeechTRON . While a seemingly simple program, allows you to enter text into a text field and have it be read back to the user - while Read More... Posted Thursday, June 09, 2005 12:52 PM by jaywaltm | 0 Comments

• Accuracy scores for text-to-speech voices - MS in 4th - but not for long

  How does one do accuracy testing of different text to speech voices? That’s a real interesting question. A voice can sound really great for a particular string and then come out as junk given ‘tricky’ text. There are all sorts of text normalization issues Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 07, 2005 5:36 PM by jaywaltm | 2 Comments

• Comparing English Text-to-Speech Samples

  So how does one go about comparing the range of text-to-speech voices available? TMA Associates has a cool page on TTS comparing and consolidating a range of male and female voices from a wide range of companies. Interestingly, Microsoft Sam (the version Read More... Posted Sunday, June 05, 2005 2:38 PM by jaywaltm | 0 Comments