Most speech programs use MS Agent technology. The "naturalness" of the voice
will depend on the speech engine and whether the program or Agent can use
this engine.
The default engine downloadable from Microsoft has a large number of voices,
but only two or three sound natural to me. For example, the default voice
used by MS Agent James and Genie both use American male voice #1 which isn't
too bad.
The most natural speech engine I have heard is the British Female voice --
you can download it here:
http://www.text-to-speech.net/voices.html
You can also get the Mary, Mike & Sam engine here -- the one used by
programs such as Read Please.
Of course, your program or agent has to be able to call up the engine. Most
agent characters by default use the standard MS Agent voices. Some programs
such as Cyber Buddy (
www.thecyberbuddy.com) will let you choose the voice to
be used by the program, but for every other program I've encountered you are
stuck with whatever the program calls up by default.
If anyone has a way of changing the TTS called up by an agent, I would be
interested in hearing about it. I haven't found anyway to decompile /
recompile an Agent that would allow me to change the TTS. And I don't have
the time to build up my own character from the ground up.
Cyberbuddy is a neat program. It's freeware that normally resides in your
sys tray -- it will read files, pop up with reminders, inspirational
thoughts, etc. You coiuld even design little "mini-plays" with MS Agent
characters giving it some entertainment value as well.
It's drawback is that it also reads news headlines, stocks etc and wants to
phone into these sites. I never found a way to stop this behaviour, even
when I unchecked all these options. Furthermore, the program consumes 10 to
12 megs RAM while open in your tray. On general principles I didn't want to
give up this much memory for a program that I didn't use all that often.
Hope this is info is helpful.
-M-
