
IBM has developed a computerised voice that is almost indistinguishable from a human. - vaksel
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/4420798/IBM-develop-most-realistic-computerised-voice.html
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randomtask
Here's a page with some sample audio clips. There are some papers that are
some credited to the guy mentioned in the article on the publications page

<http://www.research.ibm.com/tts/>

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wallflower
Acapela Group's voices are already pretty good. I bought Lucy, the British
one. She sounds almost like a voice-response automated phone system.

[http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-
demo...](http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html)

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nobbynutz
if you don't mind me asking how much was "Lucy" roughly? $100's, $1,000's,
$10,000's, more? I couldn't find a price list on the site.

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lunchbox
Lucy costs $35 USD, plus the cost of the text-to-speech program (e.g.
TextAloud, which I think is <$50): <http://www.nextup.com/acapela.html>

(Acapela doesn't sell directly to consumers; they license their technology to
resellers.)

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wallflower
As a caveat, if you are thinking of buying a voice like Lucy, it does not work
with Windows' built-in Text-to-speech (for example - Adobe Reader's text-to-
speech feature). It looks like Lernout & Hauspie has some kind of agreement
with Microsoft to lock out other competitors.

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quoderat
Here you go:

[http://www.patents.com/Generating-paralinguistic-
phenomena-v...](http://www.patents.com/Generating-paralinguistic-phenomena-
via-markup-text-to-speech-synthesis/US7472065/en-US/)

But that said, it mostly just sounds like a way to insert a bunch of annoying
"umms" and "ahs" into artificial conversation.

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lunchbox
So it looks like this system has people use simple textual markup. From the
patent:

"For example, the developer may specify: <prosody style="bad news">Well, \sigh
I cannot answer that question;</prosody>"

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sosuke
Perfect candidate for EmotionML?
<http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/XGR-emotionml/>

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abdulhaq
I'm pretty sure I've spoken to a number of these computerised voices at some
customer service call centres.

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TooMuchNick
IBM's new business plan: Run the works of the Clash through their software,
crank it through Songsmith and make millions on the YouTube adsense.

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TrevorJ
Sounds like they still have some trouble with phoneme cadence and blending.

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nobbynutz
Does anyone have a link for any further details?

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ars
Um, I don't, like, want that, er, in my, you know, like, conversations with
robots.

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mhb
No place to, uh, hear it?

