These files are designed to complement my column on sampling vintage speech synthesizers in the June 2008 Electronic Musician magazine. —David Battino
Talk It, a Windows 95 toy, is one of my favorite speech synths. The FM-based voices have an endearing, human character, as you can hear below.
To generate quick spoken IDs, I often turn to the AT&T online speech synth. Here's a sampling of four voices reading a channel ID. Feeding English text to the foreign speakers is particularly amusing.
Cepstral, another online speech synth, features some excelllent character voices. In addition to trying them online, you can buy them and install them on your computer for just $6.99 each. But using them commercially requires a hefty licensing fee.
A third online synth, Loquendo, stands out in two ways. You can make it produce vocal noises such as laughter and snoring, and it responds particularly well to punctuation. Notice what happens when I add an exclamation point to the phrase "that's brilliant." The musical watermark in the background is designed to keep people from using the audio without paying.
Unfortunately, this wonderfuly gritty voice didn't make the leap into Windows Vista, but I explain how to get it in the main article. This clip illustrates one of my favorite speech-synth techniques: creating rhythms from nonsense syllables punctuated by actual words to catch the listener's attention.
This Italian woman's voice plugs into Windows speech synths. Playing with it, I was reminded of Dr. Fiorella Terenzi's sexy voiceover in "N.E.O.," from the Gate to the Mind's Eye soundtrack she recorded with Thomas Dolby, so I produced this low-res tribute. In the article, I explain how I used XML tags to create the echo effect.
Here I coaxed the Macintosh Junior voice to sing "Happy Birthday" by adding pitch and rate tags to the text.
For emo power, nothing beats Singing Boy from the ancient Talk It! program.