[asterisk-users] Best free text to speech..

[David Backeberg]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Danny Nicholas<danny at debsinc.com> wrote:
> Cepstral and Festival are both “Free”.  In Cepstral, you pay a license fee
> for the voice you use.  In Festival, you tune the mechanical voice the way
> you want.  So if you want “Truly free”, choose Festival.  If you want a
> Human, “Professional” voice,  Cepstral offers a reasonably priced product.

I've never seen prices for Cepstral, but another commercial product is
AT&T Natural Voices.
http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/

I will say that Festival sounds  better now than it did a few years
ago. I don't know the exact date, but at some point between when we
chose to go with Natural Voices and now, Festival released a new
algorithm that sounds dramatically better than it used to.

I also really love the Scottish voices that come with Festival.
They're improper for my usage, but if you have a business catering to
customers where those accents would be appropriate it's a nice
product.