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Text To Speech in Italian for Asterisk

luglio 28th. Archive admin July 28th. 2007, 5:59 am

Over the past few months I found myself having to integrate a module of Text To Speech in Italian on asterisk. I pick through the pages of this blog on my personal experience, trying to explain in a quick 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 can 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 mediocre quality of the voices in Italian. After an extensive search on the internet I discovered that there are other commercial software solutions with TTS voices in Italian top quality. Let me cite a few:

The two cleaning produce synthetic 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, RealSpeak is that Loquendo have cost prohibitive (The sums that are around thousand dollars for each competing channel), so - personally - I had to continue my research on the internet to find the right compromise 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 Festival. There are entries for many languages, including Italian, in fact. Furthermore, the item in Italian produces a synthesis of good quality, even though 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 .