Category: Geeks r Us
hey all.
Jaws I know works with SAPPI 4 and 5.
this means I can install speech other than elaquence.
what speech stuff is out there (free or paid?)
i havent heard a lot, just SEARI, RealSpeek, Vocalizer voices, and the one that is used with Voiceover.
I thought AT&T made some voices too. I think i heard them before but forget ware i found them or what they sounded like. Are there others? if so who makes them, and can I hear samples?
for example, I know i like the voice in Narator on Windows 8.
Are there sites to hear voices or download them?
Thanks!
Yes At&t does have voices. Some others you could look into, though they're pretty expensive, are Luquendo, Cepstral (spelling?) and Acapella. If you google their websites you should be able to hear samples. But one thing to keep in mind is that even if you do purchase any of these voices, the response time with Jaws will be a lot slower. You're going to experience some lag. Eloquence may not be the best speech synth out there, but other than Espeak, which in my opinion sounds even worse, there just aren't any others that respond as quickly or efficiently. Oh, now I just remembered another company that has a decent sppeech synth, Ivona. For those I think you can download them in Klango if you want to hear what they sound like and if you use Klango.
How do I make Cepstral work with jaws so I can try it?
they dont offer refunds and i downloaded all the voices to give a shot too and have installed them all.
is there a way to make jaws work with these voices? its not in SAPI5
I see the voices under speech in the control pannel (i'm using Windows XP)
I can preview them and select them as my text to speech option.
did you accidentally choose the 64 bit sapi driver?
i dunno, but decided hel with it. way too laggy.
actually, yes i do know. i i didn't install 64-bit. i'm sure of that one.
That's probably the case.
Espeak also have sapi 5 versions which some people say sound better than the ones we know on NVDA.
But, if you are using JAWS, I would stay with Vocalizer. It's for free and they have great quolity!
i still think elaquince says stuff better , and sounds more natural than vocalizer
I wonder where I could buy the acapella voices in the US for under $100. I at least want the child voices for us and uk English.
Just to remind everyone, vocalizer expressive voices are also available for NVDA for a very affordable price!
They are also available of course in Jaws 15.
Are those voices much different from the regular vocalizer voices? I haven't had a chance to play with them yet.
I think they are a bit different yes. And there are also some new voices. You can listen samples of allmost all of them in the correspondant page inside of Jaws section in Freedom Scientific's webpage!
I went and had a look. Most of them sound exactly the same as before. One or two of the English voices might be a tad better, but just from the samples at least, it seems like the same voices given a new name to make them sound improved. The new voices are kind of neat, though Ava sounds like she's trying too hard to sound like an advertisement for luxury cars or something.
Not a fan of realspeak, neo speech, AT&T, etc. They sound all choppy, like someone gulping and hiccoupping.
I am quite fond of Acapela Rachel. I use a mac mostly, and even if I don't always use her for voiceover, I generally use her voice for reading longer passages.
Ivona voices work with Jaws and Kurzweil and can be set as the default reading voice for Adobe too. The Ivona Reader allows people to convert text to MP3 using the Ivona or other voices.
Meglet, what I have noticed with the Expressive voices in JAWS 15 is that you get the upper case pitch changes that the other Vocalizer voices would not do. If you use JAWS to announce capital letters in a higher pitched voice, Vocalizer Expressive voices will immediately seem different from the former Vocalizer voices, when you use them. This would not be apparent in a sample but only when you were navigating by character or having a word spelled out.
They should have made that part of the sample.