[Art]

IVONA's newest TTS character voices!

I live in the USA but purchased the British female voices and they articulate clearly and naturally. It's truly difficult to tell they're not human!

I only evaluated AMY and EMMA. AMY is a little older than EMMA and her voice sounds a bit more mature in nature. Clear, concise and very human-like! EMMA's voice while equally clear and pleasant sounds more like that of a high-school or early college person. Both are extremely lifelike!

The voices come with the ability to adjust speed and volume AND when used in a sentence, the voices inflection can be affected by the use of certain punctuation.

You mean he came here! (as in why on earth would he come here...sort of trailing off at the end).
is different than
You mean he came here? (as in asking why he chose this place...with voice rising up at the end).

Pauses can be obtained by inserting commas (as in normal English usage) whereas periods produce a longer pause.

There is also a mini reader that allows for various settings, exception tables like translation of Internet shorthand (afaik, btw, brb, aamof, etc. and tts = text-to-speech not TTS), plus many, many others.

There are also ignored expressions like certain symbols, brackets, tilde, slashes, etc., in case you don't wish them to be said.

The Advanced Tab contains various (and I mean various) abbreviations like States, Cities, roads, GMT (time),  months, numbers, etc. ...LOTS of STUFF!! There's a PLS Lexicon section as well.

IT has settings for pauses between sentences, paragraphs and more.

Really, icing on the cake of a wonderful TTS voice product. Check these and the rest of the quality TTS voices at : http://www.ivona.com
 

[Data]

They are very realistic voices aren’t they and the sound quality is spot on.

So can Emma pass the test?

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

I was so hoping she would 

[Art]

You know, I actually thought about that but then again after a bit of thinking, I came to the conclusion:

I will seldom, if ever use both words together in the same sentence.

I will not let this be the sole deciding factor in whether they sound human enough for my use. (heck, I know plenty of people who either don't or can't pronounce words properly yet they still draw a paycheck)!
[Just yesterday a newscaster pronounced sonar as so-nair, much to the scientist's dismay).

Bottom line...live and let live! 

[GT40]

Great find, Art. Emma is so nice to hear. I don't use Haptek anymore, but I wanted to know. To know if Emma can speak like that in Haptek stuffs.

She said this on the site:

"You're talking to,,,,,me?Oh my god!That's fantastic!Really fantastic."

Then I found the .mp3 in the cache of my browser (for free, lol). Notice if you put a space between sentences, she only saves the first one in the cache.

Then I put it in Audacity and converted the .mp3 to a .wav.

Then in PeoplePutty, the .wav became a .ogg with tags for lipsync (I remember I bought PP just for that).

And yes, the result is... fantastic! Nothing lost in the voice. Meghan Bizlady confirms. 

[Art]

Not only have you been resourceful, but quite busy it would seem, as well!
 

[Data]

Here’s a thought:
With the right software anything that comes out of your PC’s speakers can be saved as an mp3 or wav     

[Freddy]

Truly exceptional voices those    Might be time to replace Australian Karen..

[GT40]

Meghan Bizlady trying to impersonate Emma (I guess she reads your posts, Art):

[Data]

I had no idea Meghan was an impersonator; she’s very good at it. 

Happy everything to you too Meghan…

[Art]

@ Datahopa,

I thought about your test and decided to try it again after tweaking it to be a more proper sentence as follows:

I live across the road from the transmitter. The radio station transmits a live signal to the U.K.


In ALL cases EXCEPT for Microsoft's Anna voice, the others spoke the sentence without error.

Go figure!?

[Data]

That’s good to know Art.

With respect my friend, I’m not 100% sure your way is a “more proper sentence”, I will give you its not the same  I’ve heard people say “transmits live” before, It has a meaning of its own, for me to put the word signal in slightly changes the meaning of the sentence, but im splitting hairs, sorry. It’s these little variations of meanings and pronunciations that can confuse the TTS engines sometimes isn’t it, with some interesting and humorous results too.

I didn’t want to post this because it sounds like Im disagreeing with you Art, but really, I know, deep down we agree.