Friday 6 February 2009

6. The portable speech engine - DSpeech


This is neat little text-to-speech software which, while being a little "under-designed" at the interface level, has the redeaming feature that it is portable - that is you can load it onto a USB memory device. It uses the Windows voice.

There is also a speech-to-text part, but to say it did not like Wordsworth is a slight understatement. "I wandered lonely as a cloud" became "A one that will only as a cloud" while "that float on high over vale and hill" was given as "of the latest 1500 play or annual ". I can only assume it is my British accent that has fooled it. Perhaps it would do better with Walt Whitman.

This software is also available in Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese. They also claimed to have an interface for Chinese, Czech and Romanian. However, I did not have an opportunity to check if these voices are available.

DSpeech

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