Fun with voices

[richlevy]

A few days ago the Giveaway of the Day was a text to speech app and today it's an app that reads weather.

I decided to have some fun with it and went looking to update my voices. I wasn't willing to spend $20 to buy voices for something I was just fooling with, so I went looking for legally free SAPI (speech application interface) voices.

After searching, I found an article that mentioned that if you downloaded Microsoft ebook reader, you could get free voices. I found that the text-to-speech voices were a separate download, but would not install without the reader present.

So I installed the reader and then I downloaded all three text to speech packages (German, French, and English) assuming (correctly) that each would have its own voices and that it would be cool to have a female voice with a foreign accent read my weather. I loaded English last, in case any registry defaults needed to be overwritten.

Each language reader did have one male and female voice, which oddly enough are Lernout & Hauspie, not Microsoft, voices. So instead of just Microsoft's Mary, Sam, and Robot, I have 3 male and 3 female L&H voices, 2 for each language.

The final irony is that I tried using the French and German female voices to read my weather data, but couldn't get used to their accents.

The moral of the story is never give a computer geek too much free time.