DailyDirt: Computers To Talk For Us
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Computers help people communicate all the time, but they can be really helpful for people who have no voice at all (eg. Stephen Hawking). Synthetic speech technologies are getting better — with better algorithms to generate more human-like speech and cloud-based systems that allow processor-intensive software to run on handheld devices. Here are just a few examples of some computer-created voices.
- Most people usually think of synthetic speech software sounding like a HAL9000 or Gene Roddenberry’s wife, so there’s been a notable dearth of synthetic kid’s voices. Until now. Meet Harry and Rosie — a couple text-to-speech voices that sound like British children. [url]
- The Blizzard Challenge is an annual competition for taking a limited speech database and building a synthetic voice from it in order to learn more about how algorithms can be improved for speech synthesis. Someday, these results will actually make some Mission Impossible tricks seem plausible. [url]
- A new smartphone app can translate spoken words in real time from Japanese to English (or Mandarin or Korean) and vice versa. This app doesn’t do much for grammar, but it can get across some meaning even though it’s not perfect. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: asr, blizzard challenge, speech synthesis, stephen hawking, text-to-speech, translation, voice
Comments on “DailyDirt: Computers To Talk For Us”
Why are computer voices all evil?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlwdwS5-L3c
The Red Queen is a British girl… and I can just hear my GPS saying “you’re all going to die” in a little kid’s voice now. CREEPY!
Talk? We can sing!
The current best text to speech software is Text Speaker. It has customizable pronunciation, reads anything on your screen, and it even has talking reminders. It is great for learning languages as it highlights the words as they are being read. The bundled voices are well priced and sound very human. Voices are available in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and more. Easily converts blogs, email, e-books, and more to MP3 or for listening instantly.