On Dec 2, 2008, at 9:41 AM, Erik (Caneris) wrote: > Festival sucks. Cepstral sucks less. The End. > > In my experience, it depends on the specific app, who's paying, and > who's going to be the victim, err...user listening to it. This is > the difference between domain/context specific phrases/words to > pronounce vs. general stuff, a client on a tight budget or not, the > users being internal vs. customers/public, and so on. > > Cepstral is a $30 TTS engine. It's not too bad, but you'll find > mostly things like Realspeak deployed in large scale "professional" > deployments, such as those used by the "big boys", telcos/banks/ > airlines. We deployed Cepstral recently for a client, for a phone-in > service used by the general public, and I can tell you that there > was quite a bit of work in "teaching" it with SSML how to pronounce > stuff. > > Again, it really depends on your specific situation. You should > definitely try out those two at least and also ensure that the > client/stakeholders are aware of limitations. There's a certain > expectation of "it will speak perfectly" these days, followed by > disappointment and blame when reality hits them. > > Regards, > -- > Erik > Caneris > Tel: 647-723-6365 > Fax: 647-723-5365 > Toll-free: 1-866-827-0021 > www.caneris.com
Erik - Have you found RealSpeak to be worth the cost? Can Cepstral, with the hourly $ spent on tuning, be made to be a reasonable substitute? It's been a while since I did a head-to-head comparison between Cepstral and (anything else) so I did a quick demo of the RealSpeak Host-based telecom app: http://www.nuance.com/realspeak/demo/ (contact data required) and the Cepstral demo: http://www.cepstral.com/demos/ I used the "Jill (default - 8khz)" for RealSpeak and "Allison (default)" for the tests, and played back the same phrase: "Congratulations. You have successfully installed and executed the Asterisk open source PBX." My results: The RealSpeak sample was more clear than the Cepstral. But by how much? I should probably test with more than just that one phrase, but I can't say I'd prefer RealSpeak significantly over Cepstral in this extremely limited case. Does RealSpeak get better long-term test results and comprehension/retention? I know that Cepstral is $50/port - the RealSpeak pricing is un-findable, which tells me that it's significantly higher than Cepstral. (Personal peeve: at least put your list pricing on the website! <grumble>) That being said, I'd really be interested in hearing if anyone has done a RealSpeak-to-Asterisk conduit. I wasn't able to quickly uncover how they interact with third-party systems - is it VoIP? A C library? Some sort of HTTP socket? The more methods we can get working with Asterisk, the better, because not every implementation of a voice system has the same requirements... JT --- John Todd [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-256-428-6083 Asterisk Open Source Community Director _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users