Cool Online Speech Synth

Ivona is a company specializing in text to speech solutions for app developers. They offer a number of different voices and nationalities in both male and female versions.

To demonstrate their rather impressive technology, their website offers a demo of the different voices. You type in any text you like up to 250 characters, select a voice, and press the "play" button to hear the results. Need some spoken word for your next album? Record your browser's audio with a program like Audio Hijack, and you're good to go. I would imagine there are probably restrictions on how audio can be used, so as always, proceed with caution. Be sure to try entering English text and selecting one of the foreign nationalities for interesting results. Of course, if you're like me, you can probably waste hours getting it to say terrible, terrible things.

Texas Instruments PHP1500 Speech Synthesizer

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The Voder - 1939 Speech Synth

"Considered the first electrical speech synthesizer, VODER (Voice Operation DEmonstratoR) was developed by Homer Dudley at Bell Labs and demonstrated at both the 1939 New York World's Fair and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. Difficult to use and difficult to operate, VODER nonetheless paved the way for future machine-generated speech."

Texas Instruments Language Translator Speech Synth on eBay

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Vintage Texas Instruments Speech Synthesizer on eBay

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Flame Speech Synth on eBay

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Using Google Translate as a Human Beatbox

Create Digital Music posted this yesterday and it was something totally up my alley as far as repurposing technology to do something it wasn't intended for.

Essentially, they discovered that if you set Google Translate to translate German to German and enter certain combinations of consonants, it sounded an awful lot like human beatboxing. Here are the full instructions according to CDM:

1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
4) Click “listen”
5) Be amazed

How long do you suppose it will be until this turns up in a dance single?

[via Create Digital Music]

Another Free Online Speech Synthesizer

In response to my last post about YouTube's speech synth, alert reader Simon pointed us to this one which offers much higher quality and renders the output as a WAV file for you, thus eliminating the need to record its output manually. Thanks, Simon!

You Tube's Little Known Speech Synthesizer

Anyone who has spent any amount of time on YouTube can attest that the comments section beneath the videos contains some of the most neanderthal rhetoric you're ever likely to find on the internet (and that's saying a lot). Perhaps because of this (I'm too lazy to look it up, get off my back! UPDATE: Reader Brandon reports that the feature was added in response to this online comic: http://xkcd.com/481/), they added an 'Audio Preview' button that will read your post aloud, allowing you to hear how it sounds when someone says it instead of just typing it. The idea being, I guess, that once you hear it read out loud you'll realize what a petty moron you sound like. But the speech synthesis is actually quite good and could certainly serve as sample fodder if you use an audio recording utility such as Audio Hijack Pro to capture its output. It is definitely grainy and muddy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and some clever EQing and time in an audio editing program could probably clean it up quite a bit.
Benny Benassi, eat your heart out!

Cool Online Speech Synthesizer

AT&T Labs (formerly Bell Labs) have been at the forefront of speech synthesis research for a long time now. What many people don't know is that you can try this technology out for free via the web. Just follow the link below, type in the text you want to hear spoken, and you can either play it back immediately, or download it as a WAV file. Please pay special attention to the 'restrictions apply' portion of the website, as it indicates that musicians can't use speech from this website in commercial works. If you don't plan to commercially release something or just want to have fun making the speech synthesizer say dirty words (don't pretend you aren't going to do that, it insults us both...), the site is a very cool resource.

CHECK IT OUT