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
Related
My question is really: Is there an easy way to create graphs in windows phone? (Either in-built or for free)
Could you tell me of any using statements I need to add
Links would be helpful (I couldn't find many myself)
And a basic how-to would be excellent!
The Telerik RadControls produce great graphs - http://www.telerik.com/products/windows-phone.aspx
They also have a WP App that showcases their controls - http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/telerik-examples/fd55f526-d6f7-df11-9264-00237de2db9e
The Telerik RadControls are not free but they are by far, 100%, the best tools on the market. You can get them for free though if you have a couple apps published.
Go to http://www.Dvlup.com and sign up for a free Nokia Developer Account. Link in your developer account and it will import the apps you have made. Then you can submit apps you have made to the challenges they have on there.
As you can see here you can get a Nokia Premium Account Token for 1000pts which is VERY easy to get. With that token you get a free Windows PHone Developer account ($100 value) and a slew of other things like support tokens, Buddy API calls ect. I heard on the Windows Developer Show That you also get a free set of RadControls with this token right now also.
There are lot's of libraries that provide charts for Phone 7 and 8
http://www.infragistics.com/products/windows-phone/features/sparkline/ (Paid)
https://github.com/ailon/amCharts-Quick-Charts (free)
http://www.telerik.com/products/windows-phone/overview/all-controls/chart.aspx (Paid)
Also, other than those listed above, there is a Sparrow Toolkit.
Sparrow Toolkit a set of Data Visualization controls(Chart, Gauge,BulletGraph and Sparkline) with lot of flexibility, performance, faster and more efficient.
http://sparrowtoolkit.codeplex.com/
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
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 would like to write a program in C# that includes limited vocabulary speech recognition of languages such as Finnish or Polish. Microsoft's Speech SDK works great for English but can it support other languages like those? If not, what other (hopefully affordable) software tools are available?
Have a look at Microsoft Server Speech Platform 10.2. It supports both STT and TTS.
For 26 Languages, including Finnish and Polish!
Here's a link that will get you started.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/TTSandSR.aspx
A bit late post, sorry for that.
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.