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I'm making a video and need a free Text to speech creator that I can use for an artistic/entertainment non-commercial video. I want a female voice narrating a story for the video. Any ideas where I can find TTS?

Hi, the best free one I've come across is the demo on http://www.naturalreaders.com

If you want the real sounding speech, you will either have to buy the pro version or record the output from the demo on the web page. Otherwise, If I remember correctly, the voices that come with the free software sound really robotic and nasty generic Microsoft TTS. I remember trying myself to download the package but was disappointed with the voices that were supplied. So I settled for just recording the sound output of my computer.

On the website demo you have a choice of a few different characters, male and female; you even have the choice of ethnicity which and the ability to change the speed of the speech, that's pretty cool.

If you want to hear the US female 'Heather' in action, I made this composition. Its at the start and end of the track: http://soundcloud.com/headphaze/headphaze-sonicanthology

Some of the voices there are pretty good, but the best I've heard is Bridget by neospeech. They have an online demo; select british english, then Bridget. Occasional glitches, but often sounds incredibly natural.

http://www.neospeech.com/

If you want truly free -- technically you probably don't have the right to use neospeech/AT&T;/etc demo sounds in commercial or maybe even non-com/pd works -- there is festival. Female voices have wonky harmonics, but some of the male voices are quite good. You have to compile it though, or find a binary:

http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/

AT&T; has natural voices; crystal is supposed to be the best. Just google it.

Cheers,
Tiam is Tiam

Make sure that when you use the online demo you have permission to use the demo on your production.
I know about this TTs:
Espeak - opensource, but robotic. I prefer it, because it speaks too fast and I use it all the time with my screenreader
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/download.html

2)
Microsoft speech platform.
You will need install a few things:
server:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27225
speech engine for your language
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27224
And something which can use this, I should recomend only NVDA screen reader
nvda-project.org
After downloading NVDA simply agree the license and click run temporary copy. Then click on the NVDA icon on the tray area preferences >synthesyzer> first combobox microsoft speech platform. After that click preferences>voice settings where you can adjust the voice settings.

3)
Microsoft sapi 4, Mike and Marry:
http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/sapi/msttsl.exe

4) MS sapi 4, Tru voice
http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/agent2/tv_enua.exe

Just like XXIXXXXVII asked - is there ANY text-to-speech with an API, which is also free for commercial use? I haven't been able to find any.

"Balabolka console" is a commandline util which uses any free voices like e-speak. Unfortunately, it doesn't allow setting the audio bitrate. And the free voices found on the net doesn't even come close to the (bad) quality of Stephen Hawking's retro TTS device.

I'm currently creating a web site about the island where I live (has about 40.000 people on it). Not everyone reads that good (if at all), so I'd don't mind spending some extra programming time in order for those people to also see info about the island etc. But...it's not exactly helping those people, who have a hard time reading, that not one software vendor seems to be willing to sell a cheap API for webmasters - aiding those who need helping...

So if anyone knows of an API for TTS, which can be used commercially, you'd be doing a good deed for quite a few...

Don't know if this will help at all---I've searched the internet too, finding nothing good. I hate Microsoft Anna, the default TTS for Win 7, so I was looking for something else. Apparently, if you want a decent voice, you have to pay for it.

There are two websites with reasonably good paid-for voices.

The first one is the Cepstral collection of voices at http://www.cepstral.com/.

The second is the Ivona voices, at http://www.ivona.com/en/ which are more expensive but are much better quality wise.

MARY TTS !

mary.dfki.de:59125