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I tried several text-to-speak programs (on linux) such as Fetival, eSpeak, etc; but the voice in all of them is very robotic. There are voice templates to change voice from male to female, but the problem in them all is that the system read each word separately, instead of starting to read a sentence.

Is there any advanced program or trick to read a text with a relatively natural voice?

The current artificial voices cannot be listened for a long text (too boring as the listener cannot concentrate).

user 99572 is fine
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Googlebot
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6 Answers6

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After weeks of researching the same question I found the voices from Ivona (here) and Loquendo (here and here) to be the best TTS voices available for Windows. Only Ivona lists prices on their website though. To actually use the TTS voices on your Windows PC I recommend Balabolka (free), Ivona MiniReader (free) or Ivona Reader.

Next check out Clearly from Evernote. It is a browser extension currently only available for Google Chrome. It provides TTS for premium customers only. The (iSpeech powered) TTS voice is not as good as Ivona's or Loquendo's but it gives you a nice reader view on blog posts/articles by stripping away distracting page elements. You can also set it to auto-highlight the currently read word!

Check out ReadSpeaker too which can be implemented by website owners into their site. Readspeaker provides auto-highlighting of the currently read paragraph/word, auto-scrolling and the ability to change the TTS speed.

[Edit:] There are some free useful Google Chrome extensions that are powered by iSpeech as well.

Mark
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I think you mean Text-To-Speech (TTS) since you are talking about a robotic voice. TTS engines take written text and voice it back, whereas speech recognition engines understand human speech and convert it into a machine readable format. Loquendo has the most natural sounding TTS engine I have heard. They have a version for Linux. They have an interactive demo you can play with to hear how great it sounds. There TTS engine can take special characters in the text to do things like provide emphasis on phrases or even make the voice laugh or cry. Not many TTS engines do this.

akxer
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Kevin Junghans
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You can buy a ready made device . http://www.textspeak.com makes human sounding text to speech products, boards and boxes. They have 20 languages and simple are the best sounding TTS you can find.

There is no license or development...just buy the box if you only need one voice output.

(This is NOT a SW solution, but we used it in a paging systems... 5 minutes to install)

From their site

"TextSpeak Embedded Text-To-Speech modules series convert ASCII text to a natural, clear voice with unlimited vocabulary. The small footprint, plug-in solution accepts wide range of input data to generate real-time speech for Security Transit Medical and Industry.

http://www.textspeak.com/oemtts.htm

John B
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I don't know if it's open source, but Google's TTS is free, and is very natural sounding in comparison to Samsung's and Microsoft Anna.

jonsca
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Sheogorath
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Cepstral seems to provide reasonable prices for text to speech voices. You might want to check them out as an option.

http://www.cepstral.com

thatidiotguy
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When it comes to having a good sound, what you really want to look for is not the text to speech software, but the good voices: they are a separate subject.

The same voice will work accross different software. The best one I know of at the moment is named Audrey. A female voice with a british accent. Although I have to change most ' that are on the text with copy-past to one from the keyboard, it is worth it for an almost realistic sounding voice. I also have to place a pausing symbol (.,: or such) at the end of titles so she doesn't keep talking right through them. I still think it's the best voice I have so far. But I wouldn't mind finding the one from that weather channel that was mentioned ealier:

"NOAA weather radio broadcasts are EXCELLENT. I would not object to listening to that program read a long text.– Jeanne Pindar"

Here is a website which has sample voices on it: including Audrey. I have others, but I have only used her for a long time now.

PS: you have to pay for the better voices, but they will work on free text-to-speech software afterwards... at least the one I have. (Free Natural Reader)

Voice Sample web page: http://www.digitalfuturesoft.com/attnaturalvoices.php

Art G
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