Any better source TTS package for .Net?

Question

I need to implement a Text-To-Speech (TTS) system in my C#.Net application. Now I am using C# .Net TTS package (System.Speech.Synthesis), which should be the same as the speaker in Windows. But I found this TTS sounds really weird. So I would like to ask whether there is any other options for TTS system which could speak more naturally and smooth. Preferably it is free of charge because I am not doing a commercial project.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

There is a built in class with .NET which does this. Its much smoother than espeak. The best of all I had luck with was IBM's viavoice but I do not think its free anymore. There is festival tts which is free, but I couldn't use it in my desktop application.

The System.Speech is what I felt which gives the best balance between ease of use and speech quality. Viavoice sounded even better, but we had to compile the dlls to a commandline app to integrate it as a separate process to get it run. espeak provides a built in command line app which you can run in the background.