ictsan

Thanks to the CALL Centre, Edinburgh University, I have been able to use the newly licensed Scottish voice Heather. I have used it to create audio versions of text files. These have been prepared for a VI pupil who will listening to them using a Victor Reader Stream which will be the subject of a blog very soon, I hope.

Heather really is one of the clearest synthesised voices I have heard on a computer. She is a SAPI 5 voice and I have used the voice very well using Penfriend V 3.1 and Wordtalk, the free text to speech utility for MS Word. I also used a trial version of Wordtalk (v4.0) which turns marked text into a .wav or .mp3 audio file.

Here is a file of a short text that I made using WordTalk (4.0) I think sounds as good or better than any text to speech I have heard. - Wax in a candle. I improved the clarity by putting commas into longer sentences.

The text is taken from here http://wwr.wikispaces.com/Materials

Of course, the great thing is that the voice is definitely Scottish. She can manage Scottish place names rather well. Send me some text for Heather to roll her tongue round. Paste it into a comment!

This entry was posted on April 13, 2008 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Text to Speech Output, Visual Impairment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.