[Art]

Try:
http://www.ivona.com

They have some pretty nice voices and quite a variety of languages from which to choose.
The voices seemed to be clear, well spoken and at a reasonably competitive price.



http://www.cereproc.com

I had completely forgotten to mention this really nice company a while back. I liked one
of their voices so much, I bought it! (Part of my heritage). They likewise offer a nice selection
of voices which are clear, most lifelike and reasonably priced.
 

[Freddy]

Wow, voices have come a long way since I last listened to them.  Both of those are very clear and human sounding.  Thanks Art, one for the bookmarks.

And agreed, very reasonable prices too. 

[Data]

Nice voices indeed, very clear.

I had to do the test that I always do on voices, but unfortunately the ones I tried all got it wrong, they can’t say this.

I live across the road, the radio station transmits live to the uk

So far I haven’t found a voice that can pronounce the word live right yet. Good but still some imperfections IMHO.

[Freddy]

What they need maybe is a simple bit of pre-processing.  Say when you have finished entering the text it scans for ambiguities and asks you to clarify them.  Then it speaks.  An added task yes, but for the TTS to work out the context of the word would mean they would have to do a lot of AI work.  Which I am sure will happen eventually.

[Data]

Yes good point Freddy, you know better than me, but I did think some kind of Ai was needed to work out context.

I have purchased one voice from Cepstral, now im waiting for the next bread of voice that is better with context. They are pretty-well there on sound quality and realistic sounding (human like) voices these days.

[Art]

OK...

I tried your example except I made a couple of corrections.

I live across the road. The radio station transmits live to the U.K

Oddly enough, the Microsoft Mary voice worked perfectly with the second live which should rhyme with hive.
Both Cepstral Emily and Robin worked equally as well.
Scansoft's Karen (Australia) pronounced it perfectly (22 kilohertz)

Neither of the NeoSpeech voices got it correct (Kate / Paul)

Go figure. Nice test BTW! I'll keep that in mind as long as I live.

[Data]

You know what Art, I tried it on a few Microsoft voices and I was stunned, they all passed the test, there was I looking for a voice that could do it and I had some right under my nose 

Now this is funny, the MS voices can’t say this.

Microsoft games for windows live.

Live messenger.

Windows live mail.

Windows live movie maker.

Hehe 

[Art]

Funny,

Only NeoSpeech's Kate and Paul said it correctly this time!! The rest of the voices kept saying "live" as in opposite of to die.

Final go figure would be in line with what Freddy mentioned earlier...computers still do not understand the words or their usage / context in a sentence nor do they grasp slang, expressions (time flies), colloquialism, etc. Perhaps in time they may develop better routines for quick comparison and determine approximate usage.

Until then, bask in the knowledge that there are still a few things that we humans can do better than machines. Just don't bask too loudly...after all...they can listen!!

[Duskrider]

I just tried this with Sandee who uses Kate speech.

She gets  "Live messanger"  right. 

The others she gets wrong.   

[Data]

How can Sandee get it wrong? No I don’t believe it, in that case it must be us that are getting it wrong.