realistic free TTS program [closed]

Question

I have tried Festival, espeak, and MBROLA, but the voices are mediocre at best, and no where near as realistic as current commercial systems. eg this demo: http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html

What is the most realistic free TTS voice you have tried?

Answer 1

Lets start on what you want to use text to speech for? I use text to speech for WBT's. I use Adobe Captivate to creat e-Learning classes. I use the voices downloaded from Adobes website. I believe they come from neo speech. http://www.neospeech.com. They were free to me as I have Captivate already. From the website, they don't apprear to be free.

Answer 2

I have two options:

1.) Android's PicoTTS outperforms Festival, FreeTTS, and eSpeak by a long shot. Don't have an Android device? You can hear a short clip in this video to decide if you agree.

If you like PicoTTS well enough, Android has a synthesizeToFile() method that can save the audio stream to WAV. I'm not aware of any apps that use this feature, but you want to build a web service, so you'd probably have to hack in the Android java source code anyway.

2.) The next option is to use Google Translate, e.g. http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=hello+world.

This works great for strings less than 100 characters. Longer strings would have to be sent in chunks, but there is an app on The Code Project (with source) that already does this pretty well.