B10[mg]

Every morning, I find myself making breakfast as fast as possible, so I can check on the traffic jam situation, weather forecast and emails. Why not let my computer talk to me, while I prepare breakfast?

People who use Linux and are interested in text-to-speech all know festival. It's fun for a while, yet not too useful in my humble opinion, because I (and others) have problems understanding the text.

So I went to look for other software and found Cepstral.

The voices are audible, the "effects" are funny and it's easy to teach your voice how to pronounce words (names can be a problem). The only drawback: it's not for free (except for the demos).

My first bet was to write a script around the demos, thinking it'd be very expensive. But when I found out you can get a license for a mere 30 USD, I dropped my script and went for it.

I registered the voice "Callie" and am impressed by her. The quality is so much better than festival. Woohoo, awesome!

So, for the people who have nothing else to do, feel free to listen to Callie reading this entry :-)

festival, text to speech, cepstral