Recommended TTS voices

[Thordurin]

Greetings all,

I watched the scenario Jitterjames put on YouTube (twice?), and I loved the usage of functions and peripherals. I noticed he uses Neospeech's Bridget voice. I myself use Ivona's Brian (Male UK) voice, and after seeing the video I was wondering what everyone else uses.

My dream TTS would be GLaDOS from Portal, but after scouring the internet this is the closest thing I could find: http://glados.biringa.com ... and some tutorials on how to make some .wavs yourself.

So what do you use?

[Kalle]

Greetings all,

I watched the scenario Jitterjames put on YouTube (twice?), and I loved the usage of functions and peripherals. I noticed he uses Neospeech's Bridget voice. I myself use Ivona's Brian (Male UK) voice, and after seeing the video I was wondering what everyone else uses.

My dream TTS would be GLaDOS from Portal, but after scouring the internet this is the closest thing I could find: http://glados.biringa.com ... and some tutorials on how to make some .wavs yourself.

So what do you use?

Hi, I use NeoSpeech's Kate(US), Bridget(UK) and Paul(US) for english and AT&T Reiner(DE) for german in Windows. I use on my android device the SVOX TTS voices, these are really good.

[Thordurin]

Hi Kalle.

Do you rotate between the voices, or are they integrated for specific tasks?

[nime5ter]

Greetings all,

I watched the scenario Jitterjames put on YouTube (twice?), and I loved the usage of functions and peripherals.

Minor thread hijack to explain the seeming YouTube post redundancy. James's first upload was 'sabotaged' after the fact because he accidentally played copyrighted music too loudly in the background. This caused Google to block it from playing on mobile devices, among other things, so James made some adjustments to the audio track and re-uploaded it in the hopes that users would be able to view that version on mobile devices. But since so many people had already viewed, reposted, and responded to the first video, I guess he decided to keep it posted too.

[Thordurin]

Ah, thanks for the info nime5ter!

I showed my wife the video, and she was more interested in Markos than the Vox stuff.

[Kalle]

Hi Kalle.

Do you rotate between the voices, or are they integrated for specific tasks?

no, not really rotate - for the english instance of VC on my HTPC I use NeoSpeech "Paul" and for the german instance I use AT&T "Reiner". On my Desktop I use mostly NeoSpeech "Kate", but it is possible to rotate the voice for each TTS output.

[jitterjames]

GladOS would be awesome (did anyone notice my cake annotation at a the end?), but I think gladOS was played by a human actor which is why she was so expressive.  I would be equally thrilled if I could have Stephen Merchant's voice!

[nime5ter]

GladOS would be awesome (did anyone notice my cake annotation at a the end?), but I think gladOS was played by a human actor which is why she was so expressive.  I would be equally thrilled if I could have Stephen Merchant's voice!

+1. Stephen Merchant's voice would be awesome. I bet somewhere there's a car GPS system (sat nav) that uses his voice.

[nime5ter]

Ah, thanks for the info nime5ter!

I showed my wife the video, and she was more interested in Markos than the Vox stuff.

Thordurin, if your wife needs more of a Markos fix, you can let her know there's plenty more where that came from on the jitterjames Youtube channel.  

Seriously, though, even if she doesn't agree with me that VC is the most convenient way to manage music playlists while putzing around the house (i.e., I don't have to keep going to the screen/keyboard to change what I'm listening to, or find out artist info, etc. while cooking or working in my office or whatnot), I think my favourite commands are actually the OurGroceries ones. We use those daily to coordinate the grocery list. If you don't have an OurGroceries account yet but you both share the grocery shopping, I do recommend it.

James keeps telling me that VC has a low WAF. I say you guys are just *trying* to keep VC man-tained.  

[Kalle]

Thordurin, if your wife needs more of a Markos fix, you can let her know there's plenty more where that came from on the jitterjames Youtube channel.  

Seriously, though, even if she doesn't agree with me that VC is the most convenient way to manage music playlists while putzing around the house (i.e., I don't have to keep going to the screen/keyboard to change what I'm listening to, or find out artist info, etc. while cooking or working in my office or whatnot), I think my favourite commands are actually the OurGroceries ones. We use those daily to coordinate the grocery list. If you don't have an OurGroceries account yet but you both share the grocery shopping, I do recommend it.

James keeps telling me that VC has a low WAF. I say you guys are just *trying* to keep VC man-tained.  

I hope you can someday convince Karola to use the shopping list 

[MrWolf]

I (and about 6 billion other people) would love JARVIS from Iron Man but it's impossible for the same reason we can't have GLADOS.

I spent a very long time scouring the web for the best voices. IVONA's Brian is the best I found (IMHO).  I was using Kate before that, she was the best female voice I'd found by miles.

I switched to a male voice just for a change of scene, that's when the PC was renamed from Chloe to Alexander.

-P

[jitterjames]

I showed my wife the video, and she was more interested in Markos than the Vox stuff.

https://plus.google.com/photos/111676462313545255894/albums/5126012820712934129

[Ryan00]

Where does everyone go to get these voices are their any free ones I can use ?

[jitterjames]

AFAIK there are no good free voices for windows.  There are some good free beta voices for android and some good cheap ones too.

[MrWolf]

Not free, but I recommend IVONA.  Brian is the one I use.

I think Jane was the one I used to use before my PC had a sex change. 

Both really good.  They have the occasional oddity, such as when he was trying to say NBA he was saying NB"uh" until I changed the text to something like "NB-eh".  There are a few others.  I think getting him to say deluminate was a challenge.  If I remember rightly I had to type the text as "DEE-lumun-8". 

Aside from that though he is a lot more natural than any other voice I've heard.

-P