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RSS Alarm Clock: change Voice to NeoSpeech Kate


wip81

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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?

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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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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...

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:lol: 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.

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