I have been searching for a good English text-to-speech engine for my cloud-based IOS chatbot app.  You’d think that there would be lots of options out there given all the attention on mobile internet.  However, I am a bit disappointed right now. Most text-to-speech I’ve encountered sounds like robots!  Even the text-to-speech feature on Mac sounds so robotic, it’s funny.  The best TTS I’ve encountered seems to be from Oddcast/Sitepal.  However, they seem to be oriented toward websites and require (probably) substantial service fee.

Does anyone know of any low cost solution to this?  I need the voice to be high quality and not robotic.

Thanks

Have you looked at Mary TTS from DFKI?  Not sure it meets your requirement of “not robotic” but it’s open source and probably not far from state of the art. Try the online demos and see what you think. http://mary.dfki.de/

Thanks for the info.  The quality of speech is still nowhere near that of Sitepal.  For some reason, Sitepal have the best speech engine I’ve encountered.

I think it depends which voices you compare.  Sitepal Julie is good, but many of the others are robotic.  I recommend trying dfki-prudence on Mary TTS - it’s considerably better than the others.

Thanks again.  I tried dfki-prudence but still find it lacking.  The Microsoft Windows VW Kate seems pretty good, only problem is it’s on Windows.  I need to look for a solution that can run either on a Linux server or natively on IOS.  By the way, the Iphone speech synthesis is quite aweful for some reason.  You’d think a company with so much resource and attention to detail would do better.

I have TTS on my bot at:

http://www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/housebot.htm

The way I did it was to pass the bot’s output through Google’s translate API and say translate from English to English then speak the results! It doesn’t work on all browsers and is maybe a bit cheeky but it does the job without any hassle or cost to myself.

Thaks. That’s clever!  However, the Google translation voice sounds a bit slow (if only it can speed up a bit).

Yes, it used to speak a lot faster and more natural plus you can’t change the voice. However, seeing as it is free I can hardly complain.

Yes, I agree.  Doesn’t Android have a native text-to-speech engine as well?

Yes, it has one called Pico which is pretty good but I have downloaded a free one called IVONA Amy UK from the Play Store which is really good.

Thanks.  I am still waiting for some kind of text-to-speech and speech-to-text api from apple, but I got a feeling it’s not coming anytime soon.

Francis and all,

Neospeech offers Julie (the voice of Angela for Talking Friends) and Kate on Linux and iOS solutions. Paul and Bridget are great as well.

Please feel free to contact me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). I will be happy to send you a free trial.

Thank you,

Pico is actually ‘espeak’ translated to the android device. Espeak is also completely open source and runs on windows and linux. it’s quality is not as good as MARY TTS though.

Thanks for suggesting Espeak.  I did look at it.  However, the sample voice (the one reading “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe) is too robotic for me.