TTS question

[RD]

This is probably not the perfect newsgroup for this posting, so if I offend
anyone I apologize.

Does anyone know of any reasonably priced text to speech engines that can
translate to both US english and French and can be used in VB.NET with
Computer telephony applications?

I got a CTI development tool I've been using for some years (Pronexus)
together with multi-line dialogic cards, but the TTS engines that come with
it cost an arm and a leg, they're licensed at about 1000.00 bucks per TTS
session, so if you got to have it on eight lines your loooking at 8 grand
US - end user, never mind the development license, (about 1500 per machine)
that I can easily understand. The run time licenses are pricing me out of
what my customers (mostly small to medium companies) are willing to pay and
I've got to work with recorded voice files instead, so any changes in
prompts I have to record, it works but its a hassle for my customers. TTS at
an affordable price would be nice.

Any help greatly appreciated.

RD

 

[W.G. Ryan eMVP]

RD, you can use Microsoft's SpeechServer and SALT for instance and roll out
your own if the number of words you need translated are small. You can
build your grammars for instance, to recognize "Hello" and then when you see
it, use the French equivalent and vice versa. If you have a lot of free
form dictation this won't work, but if the number of responses you are
working with is small, then it's not that much work. Speech Server and SALT
are great solutions (download the Speech SDK ) although I don't know that
they or anything else is that good at language translations (people aren't
even all that great at that ;-)

 

[TheStorage]

I CAN HELP YOU!!! --- I have some engines that work really well, AT &
T, etc.
I also have a question for you, please EMAIL me directly:
(e-mail address removed)