Hi Jeff- You might be interested to know that over the last couple of months I've conducted (in the Windows world) an informal side-by-side comparison of AT&T's Natural Voices product, with Lernout and Hauspies' (now ScanSoft) RealSpeak. My small sample consisted of a few news clippings spoken with the several male and female voices available on both systems. I had about 25 people call in (mostly from the UK and US), and asked them afterwards which they preferred in "tone" and which they found the most understandable.
Most people thought that the AT&T Male voice was the most natural and pleasant to listen to, while ScanSoft's female voice had the highest "readability". I think this was due to the fact that the AT&T product occasionally ran words together - if they have fixed this bug, AT&T may come out fully on top. However, the L&H (Scansoft) product is already available in many more languages (19), and so you might also give them a call to talk about licensing before you proceed, since many of the people in the Linux world may require languages that AT&T doesn't have. Anyway, I don't mean to dampen the enthusiasm for this undertaking, as we all would benefit! Please clarify if the pricing you mention is per system, or per-port. Thanks, Scott Stingel Scott M. Stingel Emerging Voice Technology Inc. Palo Alto California & London England Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] URL: www.evtmedia.com > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeff Noxon > Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 5:07 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Poll - Would you pay $30-$50 for > high quality speech synthesis? > > > Many of you are familiar with how lousy Festival sounds. > > AT&T has a product, NaturalVoices, that sounds much better. There are > male & female voice fonts for US/UK/Indian English, French, Spanish, > and German. > > I am considering offering a linux-based text-to-speech engine based on > the NaturalVoices runtime. An asterisk module would also be provided, > making it easy to add natural sounding synthesis to Asterisk > applications. > You could also use it for other purposes, such as home automation. > > After discussing royalties with AT&T, I have concluded that I > can probably > offer such a product at the following prices: > > Runtime - $30 intro price with one voice font & one processor > Extra voices/languages - $15 each > Extra processors - $15 each > > Depending on demand, the price may rise to $50 at some point. > The lower > the demand, the higher the price, due to AT&T's royalty structure. > > There is a demo of the synthesis engine here: > http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/ If you would be willing to pay for this kind of software, please e-mail me privately (not to the list). Please indicate your purchase timeframe as well as the number of licenses, extra voices, and processors you would want. Regards, Jeff / 'Bicster' on IRC _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
