[Asterisk-Users] Multi-line TTS Outbound Dialer

[Steve Underwood]

Carl Youngblood wrote:

>
>>> What is EAGI?  I will probably use festival for the time being, but 
>>> I thing that I would eventually like to use ScanSoft's RealSpeak SDK 
>>> because it is so life-like.  Unfortunately our text alerts are fully 
>>> customizeable, so we can't pre-record them.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Beware the likelike TTS, that sucks up thousands of dollars and gets 
>> thrown away. RealSpeak is great for demos
>>
> Do you mean that it doesn't work very well in practice, or that it 
> works well but is simply not worth the money?

I mean it doesn't work very well. Several of the better TTS engines are 
now owned by ScanSoft, since they merged with SpeechWorks. I amagine the 
will rationalise their peoduct lines, and the number will reduce.

The very natural sounding TTS packages can be quite hard to understand 
when you really need to pick out inportant words, like names or 
addresses. These are just the kinds of things most TTS apps are full of. 
In practice much less natureal packages, like Eloquence, are more 
usable. People here the nice natural sounding demos, and get excited. 
Once you deploy a system for them the complain like mad, and the system 
gets ripped out.

Front end processing is very important for TTS packages - how it will 
cope with things like dates and currencies in the text stream. 
Realspeak's is (at least was the last time I tried it) almost useless. 
Again the demos sound impressive, because they are... well, demos. :-) 
Try feeding the demo text from each package into all the others. The 
results can be amusing. Eloquence has the best front end processing, and 
I believe this has now been plugged into Realspeak (another quite 
natural sounding product).

For me, the joker in the pack is Rhetorical RVoice. The demos sound 
nice. but I haven't have a chance to really evaluate it. If anyone here 
has, I'd love to hear their comments.

Regards,
Steve


Regards,
Steve