VoIP PBX

In recent months I found myself having to integrate a module Text-To-Speech in Italian on Asterisk. I pick through the pages of this blog on my personal experience, trying to explain in a brief and comprehensive argument.

Literally quoting Wikipedia : The "Text to speech (by text to speech in English, often abbreviated to TTS) is the generic name given to a number of energy speech that is able to read a human-sounding written text, reproducing sounds corresponding to the text. The TTS software can generally use different voices fictitious male or female, and read the text at different speeds, according to user requirements. "

Of course, the solution based on Festival, although completely open source, which can not be ruled out given the poor quality of the voices in Italian. After an extensive search on the internet I discovered that there are other commercial software solutions TTS voices in Italian quality. I will mention a few:

• Nuance RealSpeak
• Loquendo TTS

The two solutions produce a given speech flawless, high quality and unlike other speech engines have the advantage of being able to simulate the expressiveness of the voice. Sites shown are available for demo of Italian voices, I invite you to try to understand what I mean.

However, is that Loquendo, RealSpeak are prohibitively expensive (talking about figures that are around thousand dollars for each channel competitor), so - personally - I had to continue my research on the internet in order to find the right balance between quality and price. After a few hours of study of my research, I found the solution at low cost and acceptable quality exists and is called Cepstral Voices .

Cepstral Voices comes from a natural business evolution of the Festival. There are entries for many languages, including Italian, in fact. Also the voice in Italian produces a synthesis of good quality, although considerably less than the high-cost solutions mentioned above.

Cepstral, however, has another advantage: it is already integrated with Asterisk using the command Swift :

[cepstral-test]
exten => s,1,Answer()
exten => s,2,Swift("Ciao Mondo")

More details on this subject can be found on voip-info.org .

Tags: Call Center Systems | VoIP PBX | Asterisk Consultant Naples | PBX Phone | VoIP | Asterisk CTI | PBX | IP Phones | Networking | Linux

When I decided to buy a Mac I did it with the conviction to:

• primarily a product of good quality;
• Second, good performance;
• an operating system of undoubted quality;
• ability to use the best of three worlds (just mac, linux and windows via virtualization Parallels )

In fact I got all these things, but over time and with use, I realized that probably - in terms of hardware - Apple has gone a little savings on the quality of their components.

In fact, apart from fading in the chassis where the wrists rest, I have a very strange thing happened: the white LED that indicates the standby (among other things essential to understand when the machine is "at rest with eyes open") at some point stopped working. Panic!

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Tags: Call Center Systems | VoIP PBX | Asterisk Consultant Naples | PBX Phone | VoIP | Asterisk CTI | PBX | IP Phones | Networking | Linux