The Null Device

rVoice Demo

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.

There are 6 comments on "rVoice Demo":

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 16:25:06 2008

Posted by: Fri Jun 27 23:49:31 2008

Posted by: guest Sat Sep 20 21:00:02 2008

Where can i find this speech synthesizer now?

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org/acb/ Sun Sep 21 01:28:54 2008

If Google doesn't bring it up (and it doesn't seem to be doing so), I'm afraid you're out of luck.