I'm using Microsoft Speech Synthesis in C# and I want to know if there is a way to add echo effects and other sound effects to the speech such that the speech appears to be happening in a live stadium or a room etc. Also, I want to use other voices for my code besides Microsoft Anna in Win 7 64 bit but all I found was ways to change voices using .cpl files but I did not find any free voices. I did find http://www.cepstral.com/en/personal/download which has free voice downloads but these are for older SAPI versions - will these create problems in the current installation? Any other sources to download free voices to be used in the code or even ways to make other voices such as Sam (old windows), David (Win 8) usable?
I'm not sure about specific effects but you can choose a voice by SelectVoice(), or SelectVoiceByHints(gender, age, position, locale). Of course you can also set the rate. So you can do quite a few effects using just the Windows Speech Synthesizer. MSDN wss
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I'm build a Win Universal App with capabilities to watch live captions of the lecture which student is currently watching or attending in person. I'm looking for a built-in free solution to do audio to text operations.
macOS have the Speech lib https://developer.apple.com/documentation/speech , which we're going to use, but cannot find a similar on Windows. Found docs on Windows.Media package, but cannot figure out if it actually has audio2text api or just commands recognition https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.speechrecognition?view=winrt-22621
Maybe someone has experience with building such kind of capabilities on Windows?
Yes, you could use the Windows.Media.SpeechRecognition API for speech recognition not only with the commands recognition.
You could make a simple test with the official Speech Recognition Sample here: SpeechRecognitionAndSynthesis. Just remember to enable the Online speech recognition (Settings -> Privacy -> Speech).
I am good programmer but I am new for Robotics. I want to make small project which will recognize my speech and my light on and off.
Please provide me some reference library for all things.
What kind of hardware I need for it.
If you are new to Robotics I would diffiently recommend you to check out the Arduino device. The Arduino device is an easily programmable circut board. You can read more at http://www.arduino.cc
Regarding Speech recogniztion you could use Microsoft Speech recogniztion software, which allows you to communicate with your app via. An library. Find out how to install it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306537
The example given in your comments of saying "Lights Off" to turn a light off in a room sounds more like home automation than robotics. I would look at the open source project called Mayhem on CodePlex. This applications makes it easy to wire events with actions using plug in modules and was developed by Microsoft Labs. Modules are easy to develop and it comes out of the box with an event module for speech recognition. You just configure an event for speech recognition by telling the app what phrase you are looking for like "Lights Off". There is already an extensive list of add-on modules for Mayhem, and one of them is a reaction module for Insteon devices. This add-on module lets you control INSTEON-brand lighting and home automation devices. There is also a PhidgetsModule which allows you to control Phidgets, a set of "plug and play" building blocks for low cost USB sensing and control from your PC. Microsoft had a contest to encourage developers to create new add-on modules and you can see a demonstration here of a module called RemoteCommand which shows how you could use speech recognition over a telephone to remotely control your home.
I'm looking for speech (wave files) to text on windows server 2008 (or win server 2008 r2) using c# (at least an api that i can call from c#) that supports multilanguage.
As far as i know i can't use .net speech (sapi) because it works only on vista \ windows 7.
I can't use Microsoft Speech Platform because it not supports all the languages i need (as far as i checked there is no Hebrew (he) support).
It can't be a web based service (i need it on my server).
I'm looking for something that can be used in commercial software and i'm also willing to pay for a third party product.
Can you please help me with that?
Thanks
You have text-to-speech listed as a tag but the description sounds like speech recognition. If I understand what you want to do it is to take a wav file with speech in it and convert it too text. Actually this is not even normal speech recognition because most of the speech reco systems work on targeted speech input that use grammars to restrict the search space that the speech engine has to use. I think what you are describing is automatic translation or transcription, akin to what Google Voice does to your voice mail messages when it sends you a text translation in an email. This is a much more difficult problem and the state-of-the-art is not that advanced right now. Most of these solutions are offered as services and the best ones still use human translators when the speech recognition confidence rate is low. I think the leader in this area is Nuance. I would check with them for a solution. I know they recently bought out a company that provides this automated transcription service and perhaps they now offer it as a product. They are also a leader in transcribing doctors orders/findings automatically to text with their product Dragon Naturally Speaking.
I am making a Smart House Control System right now, and I have a little problem.
I was thinking on using Cosmos for a base system, and adding the needed namespace libraries to it, but as the usual System.Speech.Recognition namespace depends too much on Windows Speech API, I have to forget about using it.
So my question is, is there any (free if possible) voice recognition and/or speech speech synthesizer library for C#, what has the following:
support for multi-language speaking
extracting text content from speech sample
synthesizing speech with selectable (or user-written) speech pattern (voice)
A general usage, non-windows dependent library would be the best, and of course, if it was free too.
Voxeo offers developer accounts which you could use to develop a speech powered home automation system. I've interfaced it to my own home automation system for a small subset of the commands my home understands and it works great. You'll need to learn some VoiceXML to use it.
SAPI works OK for voice synthesis; I use SAPI in my system for spoken prompts in the house like a weather forecast that comes over the speakers in the morning when you walk into the bathroom. If Cosmos doesn't allow you to include all the DLLs you need maybe you could create a separate service using SAPI and then use WCF (or other) to communicate between them??
For the related problem of understanding natural language in a typed form I've developed a C# NLP Engine which I hope to be able to make available for non-commercial at some point in the future.
Extracting text from speech without specifying any grammar up-front is a very hard problem and is going to be error prone. Even if you could solve that, you'd still have the problem of trying to understand what they said using NLP. Constructing a grammar that guides the recognizer to the kinds of sentences you want to recognize (like VoiceXML does) is likely to achieve much higher accuracy.
Check out this project: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/
It's an open source speech recognition project. It is trainable with any language you want plus since its open source you can modify it to suit your needs or expand it.
We have a application that we were planing to use Microsoft speech API for. Now we tested it on Windows XP using Microsoft Sam voice and frankly it sound terrible ... It's almost impossible to hear what the voice is trying to say.
Are there other, better voice. Are there any updates or newer versions out there that are better. Are there other product, open source projects etc that can work as an alternative?
Just to clarify - It needs to have some sort of API so I actually can program against it.
On Windows about the best I have found was using the speech API and voices from AT&T Natural Voices: https://nextup.com/attnv.html
They are however VERY expensive if available at all. I have run into projects where the usage/business model was so far from what AT&T was thinking of that they wouldn't even sell a license.
There is a free software alternative, Festival: http://festvox.org/ , the quality though is horrible. It is about 10 years behind the current sound quality of commercial systems. It is however free.
A third alternative which has worked well for me was to shift the voice synthesis part of a few projects to OS X. OS X has a decent set of tools and speech APIS and a fairly decent set of stock voices. The downside of course is that prorams written for these APIs run only under OS X which runs only on Apple hardware.
AT&T Natural Voices engine produces great speech but its not free
there is also NeoSpeech which are also good - Not free as well
You don't describe your licensing needs, so I don't know if any of these will be suitable in that regard, but all of the following are sources of SAPI 5 compatible voices:
Ivona (http://www.ivona.com/) - I'm using their Kendra voice on a SAPI project.
AT&T Natural Voices (http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/)
Loquendo (http://www.loquendo.com/)
Acapela (http://www.acapela-group.com/products/products.asp)
Cepstral (http://www.cepstral.com/)
fonix (http://www.fonixspeech.com/tts.php) - only if you loved the original Speak & Spell.
Nuance RealSpeak (I'm not sure about this one...)
You can use free and open source Festival. The default Festival voice sounds a little like Stephen Hawking but you can use some other much better HTS voices. For example try selecting Peter HTS 2011 voice on this demo page: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/morevoices.html. Most of HTS voices for Festival that I've seen are not allowed for commercial use however this one seems to be free: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jyamagis/software/page54/page54.html
You can check this youtube tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmcLFJQpv2o