Latest voices
- From: "Nick Hodson" <nicholashodson@[redacted]>
- Subject: Latest voices
- Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2006 09:35:01 +0100
On Thursday 27th July 2006 www.NextUp.com, the manufacturers of
TextAloud MP3, announced the existence of twenty new 22 khz voices by
Acapela. See below for a summary. As with the previous announcement in
December 2005, of the existence of new voices by ScanSoft RealSpeak,
these voices are not all just English ones. Some are of other languages,
and ScanSoft included Indian voices and Australian ones, as well as, for
instance, French and French-Canadian. At the time I was particularly
impressed by the UK English voice, code-named "Daniel". Last week's
announcement gave us two more UK English voices, a male one code-named
"Graham", and "Lucy", a female one. Both of these are quite excellent,
and it is hard to believe that books being read by them are not being
read by a real person. I have not tried out the American English voices
because I would not be competent to tell how good they are, but I am
certainly very happy with "Graham" and "Lucy". There are a few things
that I wish had been done better, or differently, but I will be taking
these up with the manufacturer.
So now with TextAloud for $24.95 and a couple of voices at $35 each you
can make pretty convincing MP3 audiobooks that you can put onto a CD and
play back at any time with an MP3 player or on your computer.
List of Acapela voices (F-female, M-male):
American English 3F, 2M
British English 1F, 1M
Arabic 1F, 1M
Dutch 2F
French 2F, 1M
German 1F
Italian 1F
Norwegian 1F
Spanish 1F
Swedish 1F 1N