Anyone know of a good text-to-speech program whose "results" I can use in a commercial product?  I really like the AT&T labs text-to-speech (free for personal use), but the "comercial" version is $300, which is more than I want to pay.
I'm looking for a somewhat robotic female voice to use in my game.

What about Microsoft's Speech SDK?

Why don't you record your voice or a friend's, and then modify it with Audacity or something like that ?

Antoine:

Why don't you record your voice or a friend's, and then modify it with Audacity or something like that ?

Haha, that's exactly what I did, but someone still suggested I replace it with a "better sounding more robotic voice".

To get good robotic voices, you typically want to run it through a vocoder filter. (Ultra modern people will use more advanced techniques like formant shifting, but that's not simple or cheap right now AFAIK). I don't think Audacity comes with one built-in, but I know that CuBase does. Perhaps CuBase has a demo version you can download and make the voice in? Or perhaps there's another commercial program with a vocoder that has a demo you can use? (Actually, there are USB audio interfaces in the $100 range that come with "lite" versions of software that might be good enough)

As someone else said, the Microsoft Speech SDK might also be an option, just make sure you check the license.

Finally, you can save the file as a WAV file and an LPC codec with a very high compression ratio. The Xbox Live codec might be useful, if you could extract it -- it's way too robotic for my tastes :-)

Thanks, I found a free vocoder for the editing software I use (Sony Vegas), so I'll check that out.

Hmm, I'd like to use MS Sam in my Xbox game but am having a hard time finding any info on the terms of use/license. I've sent a mail to MS Support, let's see if they can help.

Official word from Microsoft: feel free to use Sam in your game. Hurrah!

Harald Maassen:

Official word from Microsoft: feel free to use Sam in your game. Hurrah!

I tried mailing Microsoft on this topic and have not heard back. Who did you contact? What exactly was the response?

To be specific, I would like to use a voice from the Microsoft Voices pack (Mary, Sam and Mike) which includes some robot voices. Given the response that you received, would these voices be allowed?

Microsoft Customer Service:

Hello Harald,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Customer Service.

 

I appreciate you for writing back to us.

 

Please note that you may use the recorded file to publish in the Xbox Community Games channel. The recorded file is your own and we have no rights over it. For further information, please call the Microsoft Presales Team at (800) 426-9400. They are available from Monday through Friday 6:00 A.M. - 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time. However, the team do not have an e-mail address.

 

I appreciate your patience.

 

Thank you,

 

Kripesh
Microsoft Customer Service Representative

jwatte:

To get good robotic voices, you typically want to run it through a vocoder filter. (Ultra modern people will use more advanced techniques like formant shifting, but that's not simple or cheap right now AFAIK). I don't think Audacity comes with one built-in, but I know that CuBase does. Perhaps CuBase has a demo version you can download and make the voice in? Or perhaps there's another commercial program with a vocoder that has a demo you can use? (Actually, there are USB audio interfaces in the $100 range that come with "lite" versions of software that might be good enough)

As someone else said, the Microsoft Speech SDK might also be an option, just make sure you check the license.

Finally, you can save the file as a WAV file and an LPC codec with a very high compression ratio. The Xbox Live codec might be useful, if you could extract it -- it's way too robotic for my tastes :-)

Speaking of licensing, you might not want to go around recommending that people use a demo to produce content that they will be exploiting commercially.  I don't think I've ever seen a software demo licensing agreement that didn't prohibit such things and it's more than a little disturbing how often that advise is thrown around on these forums.  More than a little bizarre in this case since you mention the licensing for MS Speech SDK in the following paragraph.