I have written a text-to-speech engine which lets people create their own voices, and wish to create more voices for it. I found the CMU Festival voices (like AWB, RMS, JMK, etc.), but need more voices. Are any of the voices here that are good for TTS? (aka: 1000+ sentences)

More information:

I am writing a game the requires text-to-speech, http://www.CircumReality.com. It uses TTS for the character voices, and I'll have hundreds of characters.

Right now I'm using the 8 CMU voices (and family and friends) and using voice transformation to create voices for all the characters. Unfortunately, the more voice transformation I use the lower the voice quality.

My game comes with a TTS engine that I've written. Players can record their own speech (using a tool included in my game) and generate a SAPI 5.3 TTS voice. They can give this voice to their friends, let me use it in my game, or use it in their favorite SAPI application.

If they're willing to let me use it in my game, I want to encourage them to "open source" the voice so that other text-to-speech organizations can also use it. (Would VoxForge.org be a good place?)

--- (Edited on 6/8/2009 4:51 pm [GMT-0500] by MikeRozak) ---

I found the metrics page, and some of the voices are definitely long enough, although I haven't downloaded the larger ones to hear how good of a microphone they used.

Another issue arises: How do I contact the people that recorded voices? They recorded voices assuming the recordings would be used for speech recognition, not text-to-speech. It's a bit unnerving to hear text-to-speech speaking in your voice, so I'd like to get people's permission before using their voice.

--- (Edited on 6/8/2009 10:13 pm [GMT-0500] by MikeRozak) ---

Hello Mike

About specific permissions, I think we can find out some of our contributor mails, just give a list of the voices you want. But for some it would definitely be a problem.

--- (Edited on 6/9/2009 12:15 am [GMT-0500] by nsh) ---

Thanks. I'll look through the files and get in touch with you within the next few weeks.

--- (Edited on 6/9/2009 3:10 am [GMT-0500] by MikeRozak) ---

Hi MIke,

I'm a bit backlogged here....

>I have written a text-to-speech engine which lets people create their

>own voices, and wish to create more voices for it.[...]

I see that Nickolay (nsh) has answered most of your questions - I am glad to see that you are seeking submitters permissions, though I am not sure that anything in the GPL prevents their use for any purpose - as long as the terms of the GPL are followed (e.g.: supply of source on distribution...).

Cool project BTW!  Is the source for your voice creator available yet (are you building on the FestVox code)?

>If they're willing to let me use it in my game, I want to encourage them

>to "open source" the voice so that other text-to-speech organizations

>can also use it. (Would VoxForge.org be a good place?)

Most certainly!  We have an FTP site where voices can be uploaded.

Thanks,

Ken

--- (Edited on 6/9/2009 5:04 pm [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---