Monthly Archives: December 2013

Exploring new voices for ATbar

We are really exploring other voices for ATbar and felt that we needed some comparisons. The Speech Accent Archive has an interesting paragraph in English that uses nearly all the available phonemes in the language and provides users with a range of accents saying these words:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

Starting with English is the easy option as we have this paragraph to test various speech synthesisers, although many of the test sites limit the number of characters allowed for testing the voices so the text has been truncated.

The sample Acapela voices are:

Graham

Lucy

Peter

Rachel

The sample Cereproc voices are:

Jack

Jess

Sarah

The sample Nuance Vocalizer voices are:

Serena

Daniel

More are coming…

… Arabic will follow shortly.