High-Quality Text-To-Speech engine for personal use [closed]

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I'm looking for a high-quality TTS engine that I can afford (let's say less than 1000$). So far, I've tried flite and festival with default voices. However, while the results are certainly understandable, technical texts are hard to follow.

Commercial TTS solutions from Loquendo and Readspeaker sound way better. However, these companies don't seem to be willing to sell their product to mere mortals - I can't find a price on either's homepage.

So, what are good TTS solutions for personal use?

Berey answered 10/1, 2011 at 9:57 Comment(1)

@Matt H Certainly, basically any Ars Technica article, like arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/07/… or arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/01/…. – Berey 19/1, 2011 at 21:31

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Purchase it from NextUp.com site:

NextUp.com sells the best, most natural-sounding Text to Speech voices with more than 20 languages and many accents available.

"Natural Voices" from AT&T ($35.00)
"Verbose" from NCH ($29.99)
"TextAloud" from NextUp ($29.95)
"RealSpeak" from Nuance/ScanSoft ($45.00)
"Acapela" from Acapela Group ($35.00)
"Cepstral" from Cepstral LLC ($29.99)

There are also:

"CrazyTalk6 PRO" from Reallusion ($149.95)
"IVONA Voices" from ivona ($45)
"Dragon Premium" from Nuance ($199.99)
"VoiceText" from NeoSpeech (about $74.95)
"FonixTalk" from Fonix Speech (about $45.00)
"NaturalReader" from NaturalSoft ($199.50)
"Cerevoice" from Cereproc (about $36)

Amarillas answered 18/1, 2011 at 8:24 Comment(7)

I bought Natural Voices from NextUp.com. Thanks for the extensive list! I'll post another comment here once I manage to find/write an API around it and maybe tried more voices from this list. – Berey 18/1, 2011 at 19:41

FonixTalk and VoiceText seems to have some API. Natural Voices API cost $1500: wizzardsoftware.com/att_desktop_overview.php – Amarillas 18/1, 2011 at 20:13

Well, you can always control the voice generation via SAPI as long as you're on Windows. By the way, after some testing, IVONA's examples sound better than AT&T on my machine. I'll test them and repost here ;) – Berey 18/1, 2011 at 22:38

Since 2011, IVONA has apparently (eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20110519006454/en/text-to-speech/…) outscored the competition, and many personal testimonials seem to back that up. I was a huge fan of Acapela's voices in 2011, but IVONA's do seem to remove the "bubbly" effect. – Coquille 29/1, 2013 at 21:51

Employee of Cereproc here. The personal license for most of our voices is £25.99 not $400 (that is the commercial license). Alternatively you can use our cloud server – Plunkett 1/3, 2016 at 12:27

@Plunkett Cerevoice sounds great, especially the cloud service (where installation is somebody else's problem), but I'm a little bit worried by the lack of licensing information. Am I allowed to modify or distribute the generated content. For instance, I am currently working on a project that (at the moment) needs to spell out digits only, something even the free service is sufficient for. – Berey 8/3, 2016 at 23:21

@Berey the license allows you to modify and distribute the generated audio. I asked the web manager to make the terms clearer on the website. – Plunkett 19/5, 2016 at 17:56

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I was always impressed by Ivona http://www.ivona.com/?set_lang=en They have a cheap personal version called expressivo (add .com - can't post more links) which is just $45. I know people who watch movies with Expressivo reading the subtitles, so it's actually very very good.

Inviting answered 18/1, 2011 at 18:3 Comment(1)

Indeed, the quality is excellent, probably even a little better than AT&T Natural Voices. Notably, they do this crazy price hiding, too, but if one is interested in commercial use. – Berey 18/1, 2011 at 19:39

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You can download better quality voices for festival than the ones shipped with it:

These seem to be the ones with the highest quality right now:
HMM-based Speech Synthesis System (HTS)

These seem to be ok too:
The MBROLA Project

Source: HOWTO: Make festival TTS use better voices (MBROLA / CMU / HTS)

Kilocycle answered 21/1, 2012 at 23:27 Comment(1)

Welcome to Stack Overflow! While that page may in fact answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference. Stack Overflow is only as useful as its questions and answers, and if that host goes down or their URLs get moved around, this answer becomes useless. Thanks! – Rookie 22/1, 2012 at 4:18

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AT&T has a product called Natural Voices. I think that is sounds amazing compared with all of the other products out there. I'm not sure about pricing though.

http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

Perfuse answered 10/1, 2011 at 18:24 Comment(1)

The quality is indeed impressive, but this clocks in at 1795$ just for one installation when bought from wizzardsoftware.com/att_desktop_overview.php – Berey 10/1, 2011 at 19:58

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There are also some quite impressive open source solutions.

This one sounds quite impressive. http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php

Promontory answered 18/1, 2011 at 8:37 Comment(2)

This sounds about the level of festival, maybe a little bit worse, but better than flite. However, if you compare the samples to the commercial ones linked in the question, there's a huge difference in quality. – Berey 18/1, 2011 at 10:28

The talking clock is the only one that sounds good. The rest not so good. I like the TTS engine built into MacOSX, it's pretty good. – Promontory 18/1, 2011 at 21:43

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Please check this site

Basically, it's a high level tutorial to use voices available from Android on Linux. It's quite general, but the technic should work for most TTS engine.

Blairblaire answered 15/4, 2014 at 15:4 Comment(0)

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I did some research on the topic in 2007 and tried several text to speech systems to read articles or convert them to mp3. I am surprised how little progress the consumer TTS products have made since then.

First I bought TextAloud by NextUp because in the web samples the voices sounded natural. However, it turned out that the way parts of the sentences were stressed made it really hard to understand scientific texts. I don't know if that has improved.

I then found the VoiceReader Home by Linguatec (49 Euro per voice) which did a very good job and I haven't found a better solution for myself since then. Linguatec just did an update which I have been using for a few weeks now and the quality improved even more.

However, I don't like their GUI and integration as much. I basically copy all texts that I want to read into the GUI window. Yet, the new version can also read pdf and word documents from file. And for me the most important factor is still the ease of listening and understanding of text even with a complex structure.

Linguatec looks like a small German company. I don’t know if they have their own TTS engine or use an external one.

I am not associated with Linguatec in any way and would be very interested in alternative suggestions!

Thomey answered 7/2, 2015 at 13:6 Comment(0)

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Surprisingly, loquendo does sell stuff: Price list for Pay as you go TTS. Unfortunately, this works online when online, and costs a fortune for on-demand voice generation (30 minutes a day would come just under 120.000€ per year).

Berey answered 18/1, 2011 at 8:9 Comment(0)

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Nuance vocalizer but im afraid they do not say something about the prices. Nuance has a lot of high quality speech applications, so maybe they can make you happy.

Meagre answered 18/1, 2011 at 8:15 Comment(0)

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I've used AT&T Natural Voices, they seem to sound most human to me.

Watthour answered 19/1, 2011 at 2:10 Comment(0)

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For personal use, I'm using VocaTalk Personal Podcast. The app enhances speech, makes it stereo, puts bg music, generates mp3, uploads to skydrive/google drive, syncs up with iTunes or zune and what not. Perfect for on-the-go listening. http://www.vocamedia.com/

Sporty answered 4/1, 2013 at 4:21 Comment(0)

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For personal use you could also use "TextAid" from ReadSpeaker. It is web based personal reader and uses Acapela voices. It also has a translation feature! http://www.readspeaker.com/readspeaker-textaid/

Bluebell answered 16/7, 2014 at 13:18 Comment(0)

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What about generating speech online? You can use the free website audiotext.ws text to speech to convert English texts to speech.

Poeticize answered 12/2, 2015 at 13:10 Comment(1)

Currently, I don't get any audio on this side, it is still loading even after a minute. That underscores the problem: If anything goes wrong on the network or service, the application will fail. Also, you may want to emit audio without contacting the network - for one, how will your application notify the user that there is a network problem? – Berey 12/2, 2015 at 14:4

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If you are looking for indian accent based output, take a look http://www.indiantts.com

It seem to sound most human ,Indian dialects.They offer download mp3 option I think from text.

Lotz answered 26/3, 2016 at 6:31 Comment(0)

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