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| Joined: | Saturday Sep 23rd, 2006 |
| Location: | London, United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 237 |
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I've never previously hit any (serious) problems with the default wordlist in my Comfort panels. Therefore I've never looked at any of the wordlist management options, so I'm completely in the dark regarding this area of Comfort configuration.
I've read the posts in the wordlist forum, and I've downloaded & installed the voiceproc & voiceplay tools... not done anything serious with them yet, - still trying to get my head round the instruction document..
For my own understanding, can I just check/confirm a couple of basic (mis)understandings?
- All of the words on the wordlist detailed in the documentation have been recorded by the same voice actor, but only a subset are downloaded to Comfort at any one time?
- Using the voiceproc tools, individual words selected for download to the panel can be altered? - So if a word I want is on the wordlist I can have it installed in the panel in place of any other word currently there that I don't use?
- However, if I want a word that has never been anticipated and thus recorded by the voice actor, I can still get that word in there, but it would have to be recorded first as a new sound file?
It's the last part that I may wish to investigate in greater detail... I'm not overly keen on having a disjointed voice experience with just the odd word in the vocabulary spoken in a distinctly different voice... so I think I've gathered that there are a couple of options...
- Pay Cytech to call in the same voice actor to record the specific extra words I need
- re-record the entire wordlist myself
- *IF* I can tolerate just the very occasional voice difference, I could record just my custom words myself?...
The last option would obviously be the cheapest & least effort, and it might be the case that among my friends & family I may be able to find someone who can do a reasonable impression of the current Comfort voice... but then I got to thinking... TTS via the PC can be pretty darn good these days.... I have used in the past a number of alternate TTS engines such as AT&T Natural Voices which I've been reasonably impressed with, and could certainly tolerate having my entire Comfort vocabulary spoken in some of the TTS voices I have previously heard....
And if I were to use a decent, natural sounding TTS engine, I could quite easily have it record the entire wordlist, as I could just feed in the published wordlist as a text file, & get a bunch of WAVs out the other end with little more than a few clicks...
Has anyone done this? I've just seen there is a section of the instruction document that deals with this; still have to read up a bit more.... What's considered currently the 'best' (i.e. most natural sounding) TTS engine for the Windows platform?
TIA
Paul G.
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