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Geek Culture / Text to speech for sound effects?

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Mr Tank
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Joined: 25th Nov 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 28th Feb 2007 01:08
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I found this cool site where you can type stuff in and have it read it aloud. I'd like to record some bits for my game. Is this easy to do? How would i go about it?
http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/frameset.php?frame1=talk


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indi
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 02:16
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is it just me or the voice of kate sound a little manly?


Anyway if you can get access to OSX, there is a command in terminal called "say".

open terminal and type say 'hello world'

say uses any of the voices within the operating system and can be piped to a file

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man1/say.1.html

the file it exports is an aif but can be altered for free with something like audacity to wavs if thats what you require.



To activate the speech on your windows box its cntrl shift and enter or something, type speech into the helpbox and it will show you the exact keys to hold down or where the component lives in your start menu.

You may have to use a third party product to record these voices internally, and they are very basic compared to Apples voices.

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LD52
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 03:07
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Haha its funny to test out the different voices haha ... lol
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GatorHex
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 03:13 Edited at: 28th Feb 2007 03:22
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It's not to hard to program, I did it way back on the Atari ST inthe 1990s.

Get a decent dictionary and in the front it should have a list of all the phonics (how parts of words sound). eg "trout" is made from the sounds 'tr' + 'ow' + 't'

Build up the list up in into an array and record yourself saying each of the sounds. eg "ou" = 'ow' sample.

Now search through the array to match each section of a string and when match found play the sound.

My efforts weren't as good as the commercial stuff, but it did work

http://www.KumKie.com http://bulldog.servegame.com
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Mr Tank
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 03:53
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Thanks. Kate sounds like she's got a hormone problem.

I don't have a mac, but found that thing in control panel/speech. "Sam" sounds like a robot though. I guess Audacity can record a bit like fraps does. I'll give it a go.


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H4ck1d
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 04:30
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Yep, Audicity should do it for you. You may need to mess with the sound properties panel (make sure you're in 'advanced'), but other than that it's as easy as just pressing record.

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indi
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 04:56
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if your list is small i will convert some for you.
describe if the voice is female or male, mature or young
provide a textual list of say ten different speech quotes and give me some time after work.

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Mr Tank
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 05:16
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Thanks. That would be awesome Indi. I'll have a think about what phrases i need. It won't be an awful lot of stuff. I just want a "nagging nora" to say things like "warning, shields critical", "ammo low", that kind of thing.
I'm not totally sure on the voice yet. I'm thinking maybe a fairly accentless and emotionless female voice like in halflife ("Welcome to the H.E.V. mark 4 protective system"), flight simulator "pull up! glide slope", or aliens "all personnel must evacuate immediately". Either that or a roboty voice, or even a picardalike, like in chaos engine. "exit open! level complete!".
Maybe i'll bug you when i'm decided on what's required. Don't want to waste your time.


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Gil Galvanti
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 05:43 Edited at: 28th Feb 2007 05:57
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That's cool, but is it just me or did it only last for about a minute before going to a "thanks for trying" page, where they want me to buy it. So are you saying that you could record the Microsoft Sam voice using Audacity?
EDIT: And are there any free decent text-speech things?


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indi
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 06:49 Edited at: 28th Feb 2007 06:49
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I will be using the mac to do it so its easier and not a nightmare as an after work activity.

On the flipside I just found this free program that will take any voice and make it robotic.

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2007/02/17/bitnotic-intros-free-mac-voice-synthesizer/

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BatVink
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 11:42
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The enhancements pack has Text-To-Speech. You type, it talks. I use it for debugging. When the framerate drops, it tells me - rather nifty.



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Phaelax
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Posted: 28th Feb 2007 18:14
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AT&T had a similar website some years back that did a text-speech.

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Mr Tank
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Posted: 3rd Mar 2007 04:20 Edited at: 3rd Mar 2007 04:20
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Sweet. I'd like to play with vocoders and stuff, but don't have a microphone. Sound FX is going on the back burner for the moment. I'll bookmark this, and probably bug people to do stuff when i'm closer to completion. Thanks guys.


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