Using synthetic speech?

[Arturo]

There seems to be a bunch of free/shareware text to speech software for different languages available. First I thought those might be useful in making custom voices for user missions. However, so far the only mission/campaign where I have heard synthetic voice acting is Operation Mercury by King Nothing. The synthetic speech was somewhat monotonous but much better than no voice at all.

Has anyone else tried speech synthesizer software? Is it possible to create decent voice acting without live actors?

[bedges]

i have. if you want all the 'actors' sounding the same, then no problem. there are some packages out there which mimic various voices differently enough to be able to creat a few individual characters - the apple mac's inbuilt speech facility is one example... know anyone with an apple mac? - but most software which does what you want (well) costs cash.

[Blanco]

I've used coolspeech 5.0 (not free) for the female voice of Mary which is a quite realistic one

[The-Architect]

Synthetic speech is nowhere near ready to be used as a replacement for real speech. The computer has no way of adding inflection to sentences. A couple of programs will recognise when there is a question mark but I reckon that you'd be much better off getting some voice actors.

The trouble with that though, is that everyone will record their bits in different environments and you'll also get inexperienced people sending you files with shocking amounts of echo and hiss, not to mention the horrible and in most cases impossible to get rid of, static created when they blow all over the mic when they speak. My advice is to get good at accents, find out how to change the sound of a file in subtle ways and to do it all yourself.

Good luck in sorting it out though.

[456820]

i use text to speech in my missions yes its limited i can only get 3 accents 1 of wich sounds like hes sitting in a bayonet so basically 2 good voices it doe recognise ? and ! marks so you can get a tiny bit of feel to their voices but still its not that good
i am looking for voice actors because ive had enough of the text to speech and half the time you cant understand what theyr saying
your right it is better than no voices so if you cant get voice actors use text to speech

[Ding]

gahh synthetic speech always makes the person talking sound like a robot, if you have played the ROC missions where they have microsoft sam's voice as the speech yo uwill understand what i mean