Natural Sounding Text to Speech?

Question

I am looking for some easy to install text to speech software for Ubuntu that sounds natural. I've installed Festival, Gespeaker, etc., but nothing sounds very natural. All very synthetic and hard to understand.

Any recommendations out there?

Answer 1

I have looked high and low for text to speech for Ubuntu that is high quality. There is none. My vocal cords are paralyzed so I needed TTS to add voice instructions to my Ubuntu videos. You can get commercial high quality Linux text to speech software here: http://wizzardsoftware.com/att_desktop_overview.php It's just really expensive. I ended up buying Natural Reader for Windows (doesn't work in Ubuntu under Wine) for $40. Maybe later I will get the Linux one.

I hope that helps.

Answer 2

SVOX pico2wave

In addition to all the above:

A very minimalistic tts, with a better sounding than espeak or mbrola (to my mind).

Some informations: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+source/svox/

I don't understand that pico2wave is, compared to espeak or mbrola, rarely discussed. It s so mini, but sounds realy good (natural). Without modification you'll hear a natural sounding female voice.

AND ... compared to Mbrola, it recognise Units und speaks it the right way! For example:

• 2 °C -> two degre
• 2m -> two meter
• 2kg -> two kilogram

After installation I use it in a script:

#!/bin/bash
pico2wave -l=de-DE -w=/tmp/test.wav "$1"
aplay /tmp/test.wav
rm /tmp/test.wav

That s all to have a small weight, stable working tts on Ubuntu.

best regards :o)

Answer 3

I believe Ive found the best TTS software for free using a Google Chrome extension called "SpeakIt". This only works in the Chrome browser for me on Ubuntu. It doesnt work with Chromium for some reason. SpeakIt comes with two female voices which both sound very realistic compared to everything else out there. There are at least four more male & female voices listed s Chrome extensions if you search the Chrome Web Store using "TTS" as your query.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speakit/pgeolalilifpodheeocdmbhehgnkkbak?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

For use on a website. you highlight the text you want to be read and either right click and "SpeakIt" or click the SpeakIt icon docked on the Chrome top bar.

Firefox users also have two options. Within Firefox addons, do a search for TTS and you should find "Click Speak" and also "Text to Voice". The voices are not as good as the Chrome SpeakIt voices, but are definitely usable.

The SpeakIt extension uses iSpeech technology and for a price of $20 a year, the site can convert text to MP3 audio files. You can input text, URLs, RSS feeds, as well as documents such as TXT, DOC, and PDF and output to MP3. You can make podcast, embed audio, etc. Here is a link...

http://www.ispeech.org/free.text.to.speech.tts.software

and a sample of their audio (dont know how long the link will last)...

http://www.ispeech.org/view/681080/4429622

Answer 4

I have been conducting research on the best sounding and easily tuned text to speech voices. Below is a listing of what I thought were the top 5 products in order of sound quality. Most of the websites associated with these product have an interactive demo that will allow for you to make your own determination.

1. NeoSpeech
2. iVona
3. Acapela
4. AT&T Natural voices
5. CereProc Voices

Answer 5

I find Nitech HTS voices on festival very natural and comforting over any other voices I have heard. See this link on how to set up Nitech and other sounds with festival. I have not found a good gui which I can use to configure those voices but setting them via festival.scm still works. That post is very old and you might want to find the actual installation directory using "locate festival" command

Answer 6

My favorite text-to-speech program is called Magic English, but like Natural Reader mentioned by Joe Steiger, it is a Windows program and I'm not sure if it will run under Wine.

AT&T Labs Natural Voices is available online as a demo, but that's more of a work-around than a solution...