[Asterisk-Users] high quality speech synthesis - AT&T vs the others

[Scott Stingel]

Hi Jeff-

You might be interested to know that over the last couple of months I've
conducted (in the Windows world) an informal side-by-side comparison of
AT&T's Natural Voices product, with Lernout and Hauspies' (now ScanSoft)
RealSpeak.  My small sample consisted of a few news clippings spoken with
the several male and female voices available on both systems.  I had about
25 people call in (mostly from the UK and US), and asked them afterwards
which they preferred in "tone" and which they found the most understandable.

Most people thought that the AT&T Male voice was the most natural and
pleasant to listen to, while ScanSoft's female voice had the highest
"readability".  I think this was due to the fact that the AT&T product
occasionally ran words together - if they have fixed this bug, AT&T may come
out fully on top.

However, the L&H (Scansoft) product is already available in many more
languages (19), and so you might also give them a call to talk about
licensing before you proceed, since many of the people in the Linux world
may require languages that AT&T doesn't have.

Anyway, I don't mean to dampen the enthusiasm for this undertaking, as we
all would benefit!  Please clarify if the pricing you mention is per system,
or per-port.

Thanks,
Scott Stingel


Scott M. Stingel 
Emerging Voice Technology Inc.
Palo Alto California & London England

Email:          scott at evtmedia.com   
URL:            www.evtmedia.com  



> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com 
> [mailto:asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Noxon
> Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 5:07 PM
> To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Poll - Would you pay $30-$50 for 
> high quality speech synthesis?
> 
> 
> 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
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