[GET]High Quality Voices for Text To Speech

[interpro]

Here's where you can download a wide variety of high quality voices for your TTS application. If you don't have a TTS application on your computer, you can download TextAloud from this forum. Just search for TextAloud to see the latest available.

I've purchased several high quality voices before and they're not cheap - $35 to $45 each, so if you need voices, you can save a lot of money with these downloads.

Here's the link for the voices -

Magic Button :

http://mikesttsblog.altervista.org/tts-voices/

[The Saint]

Thank you Interpro. Useful share. Appreciated

[DeVinci]

HUGE thanks, Interpro, and Max REP added.....

Regards

DV

[Lumos]

That is quite the list of voices - thanks for sharing it Interpro (+Rep added, of course).

Question, please:
I've seen folks saying that if 'free' voices are used to narrate stuff like YT vids that problems arise...are there any natural sounding ones which folks have used without getting into any trouble ??

[vijay8804]

Can we use this for YT videos?

[sjc999]

(01-31-2018 12:17 AM)vijay8804 Wrote:  Can we use this for YT videos?

You CAN. YT will, on the other hand, remove stuff it thinks is low quality or spam - having any kind of TTS will move it in that direction, but the rest of the video will decide it.

You MAY not of course. Even if you paid for them, these voices would be licensed for personal home use. Cheapest I've seen licensed for public performance was about $300 per year. That's how you do it legally - and even then there is no guarantee YT won't find you videos spammy.

[Lumos]

OK...so when someone doesn't want to narrate in their own voice - and since these things cannot be used 'legally' for public stuff - what DOES work...maybe a voice-changer s/w of some sort ??

[interpro]

In response to using computer voices on YT, many people have been doing that for quite a while and their channels are active with lots of views and subscribers, so it doesn't seem to be a problem.

If you want to use a computer voice for your videos, here's what I suggest you do -

1) Go thru all your computer voices and select the most natural sounding voice for your videos.
2) Enter the text you want spoken into your text-to-speech application, such as TextAloud (you can find it by searching this forum).
3) Edit the text for the best sound. For example, sometimes when text is entered unedited, it just doesn't sound right, but a little editing can usually improve the quality. If you need a little extra silence between to adjacent words, insert a comma between them. If you have a long word, sometimes you can add a hyphen between syllables to improve the pronunciation. This step only takes a short amount of time, but it can make a tremendous difference in the sound of the voice.

Once you're happy with the editing, save the resulting voice to a file and then open that file with the free audio software Audacity. With Audacity, you can change the pitch, tempo, amplitude and more. By using compression and equalization, you can make big improvements in voice quality. With a little tweaking, the resulting voice will come pretty close to sounding like a real person.

[interpro]

(01-31-2018 11:50 AM)smithnowt Wrote:  OK...so when someone doesn't want to narrate in their own voice - and since these things cannot be used 'legally' for public stuff - what DOES work...maybe a voice-changer s/w of some sort ??

Download Audacity - it's a high quality audio editing program and it's free. With Audacity you can change many aspects of your voice to make it sound completely different. By changing the pitch, adding a small amount of echo and setting equalization parameters, you can alter your voice to sound like a completely different person.

I don't know why it is, but for some reason most everyone doesn't like the sound of their own recorded voice. Audacity can fix that for you.

[Lumos]

Truly Excellent info in this thread - Interpro !!!
(+Rep added, of course.)