Today, on the “Clear Helper” home page, I replaced the “Chilled US/Canadian Male” voice font, which I had obtained from Cognable’s speech demo, with the Microsoft Anna voice font. Though also obviously a computer-generated, text-to-speech (TTS) voice, it sounds a little better than the male voice I first used. (See Post: “A Beginning for the Clear Helper Web Site“.)
I used a different tool this time to generate a MP3 recording of the home page text. Balabolka is a freeware TTS program that provides access to computer voices installed on Windows PCs. Using the Microsoft Speech API, Balabolka enables alteration of a voice’s rate and pitch, among other properties.
The rate of Anna’s voice seemed fine to me, but I did lower its pitch. Check out the results by playing the MP3 file embedded on the “Clear Helper” home page. I will continue to try other voices and TTS tools as I find them.
Note: Once again, I did not set up closed captioning for the MP3 file because the entire text of it is right on the home page. If anyone objects to this, please let me know why. Thanks.