[Art]

An excellent choice Tony. I have and use a Cereproc TTS for one of my bots and love the realistic speech it is able to produce.

It will not be prefect on all words as there are always exceptions with pronunciations, dialects and local vs global usage but for the most part, the Cereproc voices are a major step up and also a fairly priced product in my opinion.

[Tony Ellis]

Art, here is another video this time with a Cereproc voice which is much better than the original TTS!



Tony

[Freddy]

Good stuff Tony 

I kind of liked the stoner girl, but agree this new voice is probably going to be better.

There used to be this great female voice called Valley Girl, but I've never been able to track 'her' down - maybe Art knows.

There's been a lot of amalgamations and buy outs in the TTS market over the past few years, I really don't know who does the best ones now. My favourite were always Ivona, then they got bought out.

It might be time to do a review of the current leaders. The Linux based MaryTTS is where I was last at with TTS.

[Art]

https://www.ivona.com/
https://www.cereproc.com/
https://www.cepstral.com/
http://nextup.com/

AT&T, Acapela, Ivona and Nuance TTS voices are sometimes branded or sold via another application. This method often requires the purchaser to only use another 3rd party program in order to use or run the TTS voices. Unfortunately, this all but cripples one's freedom to experiment with other applications.

Also of note in the "Unfortunate" category is that several companies now offer their TTS voices as Telephony or Business, Help Desk, Kiosk or other SDK products and not the "stand alone" TTS voices that we could purchase* to enjoy with our robots or chatbots or other A.I. based programs. I guess it's all about the licensing and subscription fees.
* The word Purchase meant a license to use the program, not intended to imply ownership of the software.

Yes, a lot of choices have become limited but I have found that some of the ones I've listed provide pretty realistic sounding voices and some with a bit of inflection as well.

Good luck and sorry, it appears that the "Valley Girl" TTS has like, you know...left the building...like, for sure!