[Asterisk-Users] Poll - Would you pay $30-$50 for high quality speech synthesis?

[Jeff Noxon]

Many of you are familiar with how lousy Festival sounds.

AT&T has a product, NaturalVoices, that sounds much better.  There are
male & female voice fonts for US/UK/Indian English, French, Spanish,
and German.

I am considering offering a linux-based text-to-speech engine based on
the NaturalVoices runtime.  An asterisk module would also be provided,
making it easy to add natural sounding synthesis to Asterisk applications.
You could also use it for other purposes, such as home automation.

After discussing royalties with AT&T, I have concluded that I can probably
offer such a product at the following prices:

Runtime - $30 intro price with one voice font & one processor
Extra voices/languages - $15 each
Extra processors - $15 each

Depending on demand, the price may rise to $50 at some point.  The lower
the demand, the higher the price, due to AT&T's royalty structure.

There is a demo of the synthesis engine here:

http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/

If you would be willing to pay for this kind of software, please e-mail
me privately (not to the list).  Please indicate your purchase timeframe
as well as the number of licenses, extra voices, and processors you
would want.

Regards,

Jeff / 'Bicster' on IRC