High-Quality Text-To-Speech engine for personal use [closed]

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 5 years ago.

Improve this question

I'm looking for a high-quality TTS engine that I can afford (let's say less than 1000$). So far, I've tried flite and festival with default voices. However, while the results are certainly understandable, technical texts are hard to follow.

Commercial TTS solutions from Loquendo and Readspeaker sound way better. However, these companies don't seem to be willing to sell their product to mere mortals - I can't find a price on either's homepage.

So, what are good TTS solutions for personal use?

Answer 1

Purchase it from NextUp.com site:

NextUp.com sells the best, most natural-sounding Text to Speech voices with more than 20 languages and many accents available.

• "Natural Voices" from AT&T ($35.00)
• "Verbose" from NCH ($29.99)
• "TextAloud" from NextUp ($29.95)
• "RealSpeak" from Nuance/ScanSoft ($45.00)
• "Acapela" from Acapela Group ($35.00)
• "Cepstral" from Cepstral LLC ($29.99)

There are also:

• "CrazyTalk6 PRO" from Reallusion ($149.95)
• "IVONA Voices" from ivona ($45)
• "Dragon Premium" from Nuance ($199.99)
• "VoiceText" from NeoSpeech (about $74.95)
• "FonixTalk" from Fonix Speech (about $45.00)
• "NaturalReader" from NaturalSoft ($199.50)
• "Cerevoice" from Cereproc (about $36)

Answer 2

I was always impressed by Ivona http://www.ivona.com/?set_lang=en They have a cheap personal version called expressivo (add .com - can't post more links) which is just $45. I know people who watch movies with Expressivo reading the subtitles, so it's actually very very good.

Answer 3

You can download better quality voices for festival than the ones shipped with it:

These seem to be the ones with the highest quality right now:
HMM-based Speech Synthesis System (HTS)

These seem to be ok too:
The MBROLA Project

Source: HOWTO: Make festival TTS use better voices (MBROLA / CMU / HTS)

Answer 4

AT&T has a product called Natural Voices. I think that is sounds amazing compared with all of the other products out there. I'm not sure about pricing though.

http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

Answer 5

There are also some quite impressive open source solutions.

This one sounds quite impressive. http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php

Answer 6

Please check this site

Basically, it's a high level tutorial to use voices available from Android on Linux. It's quite general, but the technic should work for most TTS engine.

Answer 7

I did some research on the topic in 2007 and tried several text to speech systems to read articles or convert them to mp3. I am surprised how little progress the consumer TTS products have made since then.

First I bought TextAloud by NextUp because in the web samples the voices sounded natural. However, it turned out that the way parts of the sentences were stressed made it really hard to understand scientific texts. I don't know if that has improved.

I then found the VoiceReader Home by Linguatec (49 Euro per voice) which did a very good job and I haven't found a better solution for myself since then. Linguatec just did an update which I have been using for a few weeks now and the quality improved even more.

However, I don't like their GUI and integration as much. I basically copy all texts that I want to read into the GUI window. Yet, the new version can also read pdf and word documents from file. And for me the most important factor is still the ease of listening and understanding of text even with a complex structure.

Linguatec looks like a small German company. I don’t know if they have their own TTS engine or use an external one.

I am not associated with Linguatec in any way and would be very interested in alternative suggestions!

Answer 8

Surprisingly, loquendo does sell stuff: Price list for Pay as you go TTS. Unfortunately, this works online when online, and costs a fortune for on-demand voice generation (30 minutes a day would come just under 120.000€ per year).

Answer 9

Nuance vocalizer but im afraid they do not say something about the prices. Nuance has a lot of high quality speech applications, so maybe they can make you happy.

Answer 10

I've used AT&T Natural Voices, they seem to sound most human to me.

Answer 11

For personal use, I'm using VocaTalk Personal Podcast. The app enhances speech, makes it stereo, puts bg music, generates mp3, uploads to skydrive/google drive, syncs up with iTunes or zune and what not. Perfect for on-the-go listening. http://www.vocamedia.com/

Answer 12

For personal use you could also use "TextAid" from ReadSpeaker. It is web based personal reader and uses Acapela voices. It also has a translation feature! http://www.readspeaker.com/readspeaker-textaid/

Answer 13

What about generating speech online? You can use the free website audiotext.ws text to speech to convert English texts to speech.

Answer 14

If you are looking for indian accent based output, take a look http://www.indiantts.com

It seem to sound most human ,Indian dialects.They offer download mp3 option I think from text.