High-Quality Text-To-Speech engine for personal use [closed]

Question

I'm looking for a high-quality TTS engine that I can afford (let's say less than 1000$). So far, I've tried flite and festival with default voices. However, while the results are certainly understandable, technical texts are hard to follow.

Commercial TTS solutions from Loquendo and Readspeaker sound way better. However, these companies don't seem to be willing to sell their product to mere mortals - I can't find a price on either's homepage.

So, what are good TTS solutions for personal use?

Answer 1

Purchase it from NextUp.com site:

NextUp.com sells the best, most natural-sounding Text to Speech voices with more than 20 languages and many accents available.

• "Natural Voices" from AT&T ($35.00)
• "Verbose" from NCH ($29.99)
• "TextAloud" from NextUp ($29.95)
• "RealSpeak" from Nuance/ScanSoft ($45.00)
• "Acapela" from Acapela Group ($35.00)
• "Cepstral" from Cepstral LLC ($29.99)

There are also:

• "CrazyTalk6 PRO" from Reallusion ($149.95)
• "IVONA Voices" from ivona ($45)
• "Dragon Premium" from Nuance ($199.99)
• "VoiceText" from NeoSpeech (about $74.95)
• "FonixTalk" from Fonix Speech (about $45.00)
• "NaturalReader" from NaturalSoft ($199.50)
• "Cerevoice" from Cereproc (about $36)

Answer 2

I was always impressed by Ivona http://www.ivona.com/?set_lang=en They have a cheap personal version called expressivo (add .com - can't post more links) which is just $45. I know people who watch movies with Expressivo reading the subtitles, so it's actually very very good.

Answer 3

You can download better quality voices for festival than the ones shipped with it:

These seem to be the ones with the highest quality right now:
HMM-based Speech Synthesis System (HTS)

These seem to be ok too:
The MBROLA Project

Source: HOWTO: Make festival TTS use better voices (MBROLA / CMU / HTS)