Another online speech synthesizer demo; this one (ScanSoft's rVoice), however, has multiple accents, including British (i.e., RP), Scottish, Australian (only in sheila, though, and not bloke), Spanish, and not only American but also Valley Girl (more formally known as "Southern California").

Which is rather nifty; it's good to be able to get synthesized speech that doesn't sound either generic-American or (occasionally) RP-British (which some call the BBC accent, except for the fact that nobody on the BBC talks like that these days).

Apparently one of their markets is call centres and voice-response systems (and some of the voices have normal and call-centre modes of diction). Which could explain the presence of a Scottish accent; apparently, studies in Britain found that Scottish accents are considered the most soothing/least aggravating to call centre callers.

Posted by: steff | http://ofterdingenandkropotkin.blogspot.com | Tue Mar 22 10:11:44 2005

This is great fun, thanks! Btw, Is there an easy way to link audio files to a blog that I don't know of ?

Posted by: Adam | http:// | Tue Mar 22 22:48:56 2005

Darn, "Valley-girl/Male/German" didn't work. I was really hoping to hear what that would sound like... :-)

Posted by: neoreal | www. | Sat May 24 17:25:06 2008

Posted by: | | Sat Jun 28 00:49:31 2008

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