Text-to-Speech
Contents
Introduction
Text To Speech,(TTS), converts text into sound.
EA integrate third party TTS software to provide this functionality, most recent robots, 2014 onwards use Acapela.
EA have also written software interfaces for:
All of the above TTS solutions are licenced, paid for software supplied by third party vendors, EA robots like RoboThespian and SociBot are normally shipped with at least one voice installed.
The default voice is the Acapela English male character Graham.
Please specify any other voices you would like installed when ordering your robot, additional voices can also be installed remotely at a later date. There is a licence fee payable for each voice installed.
There are some free to use TTS solutions available like Festival these can be integrated by the customer if required but are not supported by EA.
Automatically generated mouth shapes and movements from TTS
Please note that Acapela Text-to-Speech (TTS) not only generates audio files from text, it also generates mouth shapes used by InYaFace on robots with a Projected Face.
Your projected face robot will lipsync with realistic mouth shapes and movements to any Text-to-Speech created with Acapela in Virtual Robot so you don't have to create the mouth movements yourself. You can modify these mouth shapes, or replace with your own in Virtual Robot if desired.
Technical details here - Text-to-speech Auto Generated Mouth Positions
This functionality is currently being developed to work with any Acapela voices installed locally on your robot as well.
Languages
TTS supports many different languages, and speakers, male, female, children, and characters.
There are also controls to vary the speed and tone of voices.
You test many of the Acapela voices on their website
As of Spring 2016 there are 34 Acapela Languages available:
- Arabic
- Catalan
- Chinese Mandarin
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch (Belgium)
- Dutch (Netherlands)
- English (Australia)
- English (India)
- English (UK)
- English (US)
- Finnish
- French
- French (Belgium)
- French (Canada)
- German
- Greek
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Russian
- Spanish
- Spanish (North America)
- Swedish
- Swedish (Finland)
- Turkish
