Difference between revisions of "Text-to-Speech"

Revision as of 08:37, April 14, 2012

AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech is a voice generator developed by AT&T Labs. Its function is to render a written input text as spoken output, emulating a natural human voice. It works with some six languages and varieties and fifteen different voices.

While it does render much text impressively naturally, it still sounds somewhat fake and mechanical, and it renders mispronunciations of certain words. For this reason, it has been used to generate sound files for many of the CRAPTMND pages corresponding to the sound files of the original YTMNDs that they parody. For example, the CRAPTMND of Picard teaches art class, uses one of the British English voices to render Captain Picard's famous line "The line must be drawn here". Another CRAPTMND, which is a parody of the A Dramatic Reading, presents a "dramatic reading" of a poorly written e-mail from Lee Kaplan to Max in which he threatens to have his brother sue Max because of some YTMND sites containing the text "Lee Kaplan is a douchebag". While not hugely popular, as is symptomatic of CRAPTMNDs, the site did give rise to some amusement, specifically because "douchebag" was pronounced as "Dutch-bag".

Perhaps the most notorious use of AT&T Labs Voice Generator is by the mysterious Dr-L337, many of whose sites feature the words "doctor leet" pronounced by the American English voice called Mike.

Text-to-Speech is also used in the Moon Man fad and several sites featuring Stephen Hawking.