Ibm Viavoice Tts Voices

VoiceWizard:the speech resourcefor executives and other adventurers exploring voice technologymiraclesIBMViaVoice Millennium cont'd:Text To Speech PerformanceViaVoice has a winsome animated agent which will read text startingfrom the current cursor position. The agent does surprisinglywell with abbreviations, company names and so on. Especially impressivewas its sense of phrasing and its sense of exactly where a normalperson might actually take a pause or breath.However, refinement to this feature is still needed. For example,there is a limitation on the amount of text-to-speech that maybe read. If the document in question is longer than that amount,there is no way to go beyond that limitation other than manuallysplitting the remainder off into a new document.ViaVoice provides some additional specialized vocabulary topicswhich may be switched in and out of any dictation session. The'chatter's jargon' topic will take certain phrases such as 'rollingon the floor laughing' spell it as 'rofl' in keeping with chatroom culture. But the text-to-speech processing does not havesymmetrical understanding of these particular abbreviations andpronounces the characters phonetically instead.As part of the process of getting started, the text to speechagent selects that text from the current cursor position throughthe end of the document.

Within SpeakPad, after the text is selected,the text is positioned on the screen so that the beginning positionof the cursor is in the upper left most corner of the editingwindow, a quite reasonable place for it to be. But within somethinglike Netscape Mail, the text is left positioned at the last wordof the message. This asymmetry was confusing and sometimes troublesomefor our users.Some of our testers used the text to speech agent as a way toaudio proofread documents that had been stared at for some time.The agent's voice was useful in detecting errors that the eyeballjust didn't see any more. But there was an odd inconsistency inbehavior when the tester paused the agent in order to make a correction.The first click, after the pause, needed to move the blinkingcursor to the physical correction location wouldn't take. Onehas to click twice. If you don't, the correction is made at theplace where reading started which is typically not the place wherethe correction actually is needed.Our testers found this extra muscle event was often hard toremember to do with the result that the correction had to be redonein some way.

One also had to close down the agent and restartthe whole readback sequence from the main menu to get the agentto begin reading at the newly corrected words rather than simplyclicking the play button on the agent. Often that was cumbersome.Every once in awhile in testing these products, there is a littlecomic relief amidst the seemingly endless detail. The text-to-speechagent, as we mentioned earlier, generally had fine performanceregarding phrasing. But long bulleted lists or the long list ofdashes in the separator marks of e-mail from the popular 'Hotmail.com'caused the agent to gradually lower the pitch of its reading voice.We stood around taking bets - 'How low would it go?'

- we askedeach other. Well, it's probably heartless to take bets like thison robots - they are defenseless after all.More:More: More:You are here:More.

Viavoice Windows 10

High-quality expressive TTS that speaks in a multitude of voices created by youModern TTS technology approaches human capabilities in terms of speech naturalness and expressiveness. With automation and flexibility, TTS has the potential for more and more applications in domains such as entertainment and education. A fundamental barrier that limits the spread of TTS is that speech synthesis systems can speak in a limited number of voices prepared in advance, typically using an expensive, labor consuming and lengthy process.Traditionally, each TTS voice is created from a corpus of a single speaker audio recordings. A typical high-quality TTS voice requires 10 – 20 hours of audio data recorded from a voice actor in a professional studio.

Actor auditions and recordings could take weeks. Then the recordings are converted to a TTS voice dataset using a complex semi-automatic process. This process typically involves manual inspection and cleaning steps performed by skilled personnel.

Hence, this process is time consuming and costly.The IBM Virtual Voice Creator technology removes this barrier by allowing users to change a TTS voice according to their needs and imagination. An entire universe populated with different human voices, along with exaggerated cartoonish ones, can now be derived from a couple of standard TTS voices. How the IBM Virtual Voice Creator worksThe Virtual Voice Creator is built on top of the technology. This TTS technology employs the unit selection synthesis approach, that, as of today, provides the most natural sound and intonation achievable with modern commercial TTS systems. Watson TTS comes with a set of rich and meticulously cleaned standard voice datasets.The IBM Virtual Voice Creator adds unique voice transformation capabilities to Watson TTS. We use a sophisticated offline analysis process to prepare the standard voice datasets for transformations that alter voice qualities and perceived speaker identity at synthesis time. The transformations modify various aspects of the voice components associated with the key organs of human speech production mechanism: the vocal folds and vocal tract.The following speech samples demonstrate the effects of individual voice modifications.

Nuance Voice

The solution’s web GUI studio allows users to configure the voice transformations in a simple and fast way. The user simply selects a standard voice as a basis, and can change it by controlling the vocal tract size and shape, tone, glottal tension, breathiness and speed. All this is facilitated by immediate audio feedback. The user can then store the transformation configuration and the standard voice reference as a new virtual voice, and use it in the future to synthesize any text.The entire solution, including the virtual voice design and synthesis components, is delivered as a cloud service.The IBM Virtual Voice Creator R&D team is working on enriching the voice transformations repertoire and enhancing speech expressiveness. An example use case – video game voiceover automationVoices in games, especially in role playing and adventure game genres, are vital for the gamer experience. That’s why game developers have started using professional voice actors on a regular basis.However, discussions on game developers’ forums are going around such questions as: Why are so many games not fully voiced? Why are game dialogs often presented as text bubbles?The reasons are rooted in the costly and cumbersome legacy voiceover process, the only phase where the game developer depends on human actors and media capturing.

Publications and PatentsUS patent application 15/594606. “Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Dynamically-Created Virtual Voices”.

Filed on 14 May 2017.A. Shechtman, and A. Rendel, “Semi Parametric Concatenative TTS with Instant Voice Modification Capabilities”, in Proc. Of INTERSPEECH 2017.R. Fernandez, A. Ramabhadran, and R. Hoory, 'Using Deep Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks for Prosodic-Target Prediction in a Unit-Selection Text-to-Speech System', in Proc.

Voice Recognition Software

Of INTERSPEECH 2015.J. Fernandez, W. Hamza, and M. Picheny, 'The IBM expressive Text-to-Speech synthesis system for American English', IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, vol.

1099–1108, 2006.