A couple of days ago I posted a blog which I titled Creating an HTML Application to Convert Text Files to Audio Files, in which I showed how to create an HTML Application that will convert a text file to an audio file. I thought that I would follow up that article with a quick demonstration which compares some of the built-in text-to-speech voices that ship with Windows 7 and Windows 8.
For the text in this demonstration I will use Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem titled The Raven, which is one of my personal favorites. (I used to have the poem memorized as a teenager... that might have been when I was going through a Fahrenheit 451 phase.)
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Click the above image
to download the text file. |
Microsoft Anna (Windows 7)
For the first demo we will take a look at the poem as read by the Microsoft Anna text-to-speech voice, which ships with Windows 7. This voice is acceptable, and certainly better than the text-to-speech voices which shipped before Windows 7 was released. But still, it has a few odd quirks to it, and as a result this voice typically sounds unnatural to me.
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Click the above image
to download the MP3 file. |
Microsoft David (Windows 8)
For the second demo we will take a look at the poem as read by the Microsoft David text-to-speech voice, which ships with Windows 8. This voice is considerably more acceptable that Microsoft Anna, and it sounds very natural to me. It is obviously a male voice, and several people with whom I have discussed this subject seem to prefer the Microsoft David voice over all the others.
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Click the above image
to download the MP3 file. |
Microsoft Hazel (Windows 8)
For the third demo we will take a look at the poem as read by the Microsoft Hazel text-to-speech voice, which also ships with Windows 8. This also much better than the text-to-speech voices which shipped before Windows 7, and it has an English accent which makes it fun for converting literary works.
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Click the above image
to download the MP3 file. |
Microsoft Zira (Windows 8)
For the fourth and final demo we will take a look at the poem as read by the Microsoft Zira text-to-speech voice, which also ships with Windows 8. This voice is my personal favorite, as I find it the most-natural sounding of all the text-to-speech voices which ship with Windows 7; this is the voice that I used for all of my textbook reading assignments.
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Click the above image
to download the MP3 file. |
In Closing
As a parting thought, the text-to-speech voices which ship with Windows 8 are extremely good in my opinion; they sound very natural, and they are very easy to understand. As a result, I have a tendency to speed up the playback a little when I am using the script which I shared in my previous blog. That being said, I hope these samples help to demonstrate the various text-to-speech voices that are available in the recent versions of Windows.
Note: This blog was originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/