batch create .wavs from written text?

[Fat Tone]

Here's a question I came across that I thought might be right up the alley of some of you murcers:

I was wondering if anyone knew of a good program (shareware or commercial, any platform) for creating auditory wav files from written text. I currently have a list of 5000 words, but I'm having difficulty creating auditory versions of the words. I'm searching for a program which will input a list of words, digitize them in a spoken voice and create and save .wav files. I'm trying to avoid the daunting task of speaking 5000 words into a microphone.

Any suggestions?

TIA

T.

[Wombat]

Yeah, there's definitely linux drivers where you can send the text to a filehandle and it outputs sound.

[az]

All text-to-speech software I've heard sounded awful, and I think they are especially unsuitable for creating highly recognizable and correct single words.

Speaking the words yourself may sound like rather less fun, but the quality should be much better (and you would have to listen through the 5000 artificially generated words anyway, which in my book is far more boring than speaking the words yourself in the first place).

If you still want to do it, though, just use the text-to-speech software of your choice and record the output (use total recorder if the recording doesn't work). I am sure there is software that can find gaps in a WAV file and create tracks from that. Maybe total recorder or any other recording app can create tracks from gaps automatically. That still doesn't fix the problem of naming the files, though (I guess you want to be able to tell which word you are going to play).

So no matter how you look at it, it's a bothersome and boring task. Have fun

AZ

[VJ]

You could of course try the Microsoft Narrator, and record the text as one large wav-file. Cutting up a wavfile could be done automatically if there are pauses inbetween...

(e.g. the latest Acrobat Reader allows you to have the text read out)


Jörg

[Greebe]

you could also take the slow tedious way of going through Merriam Webster online dictionary and save the wave files


not the route I'd take but is another option

[GNEP]

You should be able to find out what Stephen Hawking is using and use that...

[VJ]

I read he has problems: there is newer software which would result in a different voice. However, he'd like to keep his current voice, even though it is an older version. (his voice sounds like my AWE32, which had Creative software for Text-To-Speech; it was better than the current Microsoft voice)


Jörg

[Ribbit]

His voice sounds an awful lot like a speech synthesiser I used to have on my Apple ][ (it was all-software by the way - very impressive on a 1MHz 8-bit machine).

[TnT]

I used http://freetts.sourceforge.net/ for a project. It's a library to do text-to-speech in Java. You could write a quick program that would go through your files and spit out sounds. The low quality included voices sound like 50s robots, but there are instructions for getting higher quality voices. So maybe that would be worth a look.

[spadnos]

Find a Commodore 64 and a black Panasonic tape recorder, and use SAM (Software Automatic Mouth)

- Steve

[Fat Tone]

Thanks all.

I used to have text-to-speech on the BBC Micro...worked much better if the text was on the screen, iykwim

[Fat Tone]

Here's a Mac script to the conversion:

http://www.apple.com/applescript/macosx/text2audio.html

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by spadnos
Find a Commodore 64 and a black Panasonic tape recorder, and use SAM (Software Automatic Mouth)

- Steve

That was it! I had that on my Apple!