High-Quality Text-To-Speech engine for personal us

Question

I'm looking for a high-quality TTS engine that I can afford (let's say less than 1000$). So far, I've tried flite and festival with default voices. However, while the results are certainly understandable, technical texts are hard to follow.

Commercial TTS solutions from Loquendo and Readspeaker sound way better. However, these companies don't seem to be willing to sell their product to mere mortals - I can't find a price on either's homepage.

So, what are good TTS solutions for personal use?

Answer 1

Surprisingly, loquendo does sell stuff: Price list for Pay as you go TTS. Unfortunately, this works online when online, and costs a fortune for on-demand voice generation (30 minutes a day would come just under 120.000€ per year).

Answer 2

Please check this site

Basically, it's a high level tutorial to use voices available from Android on Linux. It's quite general, but the technic should work for most TTS engine.

Answer 3

AT&T has a product called Natural Voices. I think that is sounds amazing compared with all of the other products out there. I'm not sure about pricing though.

http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

Answer 4

Purchase it from NextUp.com site:

NextUp.com sells the best, most natural-sounding Text to Speech voices with more than 20 languages and many accents available.

• "Natural Voices" from AT&T ($35.00)
• "Verbose" from NCH ($29.99)
• "TextAloud" from NextUp ($29.95)
• "RealSpeak" from Nuance/ScanSoft ($45.00)
• "Acapela" from Acapela Group ($35.00)
• "Cepstral" from Cepstral LLC ($29.99)

There are also:

• "CrazyTalk6 PRO" from Reallusion ($149.95)
• "IVONA Voices" from ivona ($45)
• "Dragon Premium" from Nuance ($199.99)
• "VoiceText" from NeoSpeech (about $74.95)
• "FonixTalk" from Fonix Speech (about $45.00)
• "NaturalReader" from NaturalSoft ($199.50)
• "Cerevoice" from Cereproc (about $36)

Answer 5

Nuance vocalizer but im afraid they do not say something about the prices. Nuance has a lot of high quality speech applications, so maybe they can make you happy.

Answer 6

What about generating speech online? You can use the free website audiotext.ws text to speech to convert English texts to speech.