Out of curiosity, are there any programs that allow you to do a voiceover without actually having a person to read it. It would be similar to http://www.vocaloid.com/en/features.html but without the singing feature.

AT&T has a site where you can try out a Text-to-Speech technology and download the .wav files, although you can only use it for non-commercial purposes according to the usage policy.

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

Also, on the PC, there's this program called Natural Readers, although I've never used it, it seems you have to pay if you want it to export.

http://www.naturalreaders.com/

Another free Windows program is Sh**talker, which doesn't record to mp3 or anything, but you could use some other program to record the output.

Sure there are.

And they all sound like a computer reading copy.

The human voice is a pretty complex and variable thing.

You can say "How are you" about a thousand ways.

Happy, sad, scared, confident, sarcastic, silly, goofy, angry etc. etc. etc.

Without a brain to decide which is the best way in THIS situation, you're left with flat.

Apple's latest text reader (Voice Over - part of the Easy Access suite of automation tools) is about state of the art. Male, female, even a nice British accent. But the timing and inflection are still clearly computerized.

FWIW

Sure there are.

And they all sound like a computer reading copy.

The human voice is a pretty complex and variable thing.

You can say "How are you" about a thousand ways.

Happy, sad, scared, confident, sarcastic, silly, goofy, angry etc. etc. etc.

Without a brain to decide which is the best way in THIS situation, you're left with flat.

Apple's latest text reader (Voice Over - part of the Easy Access suite of automation tools) is about state of the art. Male, female, even a nice British accent. But the timing and inflection are still clearly computerized.

FWIW

Oh, I don't know ... it would go along very nicely with the mindless plastic "call on hold" type music that so many people seem to add to their videos.

:-)

are we thinking Max Headroom remakes?

Re computer generated voice---

A couple of years back I went to the big graphics show - SIGGRAPH - where George Lucas was the keynote speaker. One of the questions he answered related to what breakthroughs were needed in computer animation.

His answer was pretty interesting. he said that he didn't think any breakthroughs were required, just a lot of improvement on the tools that were already available. His rationale was that they could already deceive the eye pretty well.

Where the breakthrough was required, he said, was in the area of emotionally convincing voice generation.

I've been forced to sit through a couple of hours of online training videos with the computer-generated voice-overs, and quite frankly would like to choke the ever-lovin' crap out of whoever made the decision to NOT hire a real person to read. The droning quality and background sibilance could put a three-pot-a-day coffee drinker to sleep. About the only time I'd consider using a synthesized voice is when the script called for one.

Martin