wip81 Posted September 10, 2006 Share Posted September 10, 2006 Hi everyone I've just been infected with the HAK.5 virus because of your episode with the RSS Alarm clock. After I watched that, I immediately downloaded all available episodes and watched those too. My opinion is the same as almost everyones in this forum...great great work and amazingly interesting. I set up the alarm clock right away and ran only into one minor problem, which answer I couldn't find - neither via google nor in your forum. I purchased the NeoSpeech Voices Kate (incredibly great) and Paul because I control my MediaCenter through voice recognition. As the software I use to do that can "answer" me, I needed something different than Microsoft Mary. Now I wanted to implement the Kate voice into the RSS Alarm clock but because of my lack of skills (!) and experience (!) with scripts I really wasn't able too. The Kate voice is already defined as standard. Could someone please point me in the right direction? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rFayjW98ciLoNQLDZmFRKD Posted September 10, 2006 Share Posted September 10, 2006 Welcome to the forums! I personly use festival, mostly because it is open cource, and it sounds better then M$'s speach system. Does you application have a command line interfce? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wip81 Posted September 10, 2006 Author Share Posted September 10, 2006 Hi Computer_Kid And thanks for the fast answer. I don't use the NeoSpeech voice through another application. These voices can be added to the TTS engine of windows. As I mentioned: The voice is defined as a standard in these settings. It just isn't used to read the RSS headlines :(. What would I have to do to change the voice? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted September 10, 2006 Share Posted September 10, 2006 Try seeing if you can set it to a different MS voice without issue? Would show if its an issue with that voice or with that particular program. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wip81 Posted September 10, 2006 Author Share Posted September 10, 2006 Hi there I did change the voices in the standards and that works apparentely. But the problem is that the voice in the wave file sounds completely (!) different than the one in the settings. To be more specific: It's like a low quality version (not only the sound - the naturalness as well) of the voice. It seems that I heard "Kate" before (sorry...) but I couldn't recognize that as it sounded so badly. Any ideas Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted September 10, 2006 Share Posted September 10, 2006 Just set the voice you want to use in the voice options of XP. Start -> control panel -> speech -> text to speech (2nd tab). first option there. Set your choice of voice there, apply it, and run the script again to test. All the vbs script does is take the voice output from MS and record it, so whatever voice you have there is the one it uses. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wip81 Posted September 10, 2006 Author Share Posted September 10, 2006 Thanks VaKo I changed it and it worked. It was using Kate (an incredibly natural voice) but it sounded so bad that I couldn't recognize her - not only the sound - the "naturalness" as well. Any idea why that could be? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted September 10, 2006 Share Posted September 10, 2006 I don't know the voice your using, but one reason there so bad is the way computers are limited still. When we speak, we make a stream of sound, running the sounds of the words together to make the sound of the sentance. When a computer speaks, its just taking a series of samples, and playing them in the order produce by matching the text entered and the metadata from the voice samples. There is no modification of the sound in the context of a sentance. You can try playing with the settings but there is only so much you can do. Unless you can find your own Kate, and get her to read it out to you each morning, its never going to sound that sexy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moonlit Posted September 10, 2006 Share Posted September 10, 2006 You could make a small 'translator' app to pass the text through... When I used to play with voice synthesis on Amiga and Acorn computers way back when, I used to spell the words in a more phonetic way... This technique carries over to the Windows text-to-speech thing... here's an example; supercalafragalisticexpialadocious A made up word, I know but I couldn't think of anything it can't pronounce right now ;) To make the 'calafragalistic' part sound correct, you must replace the 'g' with 'j' to replace the 'guh' sound with a 'juh' and replace the last 'c' with a 'k' to correct the 's' sound the text to speech engine adds... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wip81 Posted September 10, 2006 Author Share Posted September 10, 2006 VaKo I guess a real Kate would come in very handy...unfortunately you can't download those yet. I was just surprised that the read headlines sounded so much different than the usual "Kate" voice I hear when it answers me during voice control. Thanks to all of you for your great help. I think I'm gonna be satisfied with what I got right now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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