text to speech to mp3

March 27, 2008 11:15 AM

What's the best quality method for doing text to speech to mp3?

In OS X 10.5, the Alex voice is able to make good quality speech output, plus a utility like Orator can turn text into an mp3 with the Alex voice.

The good: it's free, it's fast and it works. The bad: the voice is a bit clipped on the ends of words and the phrasing is a bit clunky. Overall, Alex is pretty good in pronunciation and rhythm, better than I thought it would be.

I'm wondering how else I could do this? Does Vista Home Premium have better speech voices? If so, how to make the step to an mp3 file.

Are there any other methods available for doing this? I don't want to spend any money for software on this project, though that could be a possibility in the future, so it would be useful to know if there are any killer commercial techniques for doing this.

posted by D-ten to technology (5 comments total)

vozMe is another free method, though I think you'll find the voice worse than Alex.
posted by scottreynen at 12:07 PM on March 27, 2008

Read The Words or AT&T Text-to-Speech Demo (limited to 300 characters)?
posted by davcoo at 12:14 PM on March 27, 2008

Not free, but, Cepstral offers relatively reasonable prices for voices for text-to-speech.
posted by ejaned8 at 12:27 PM on March 27, 2008

Computers still have computery voices. It's sad, but true.

If you're looking for a really-real sounding voice, maybe hire someone to read it to you...? May sound weird, but I imagine it's not an uncommon service.

I'd recommend against pretending you're blind to use this free service however.
posted by stokast at 12:52 PM on March 27, 2008

Okay, thanks for the tips. I tried Read The Words and the phrasing was not as good as Alex. I've also tried Cepstral and didn't find the voices that much better than Alex to warrant spending money.
posted by diode at 9:23 PM on March 27, 2008