AT&T Natural Voices Review

I only recently had a chance to demo AT&T Natural Voices on a friend's PC, and I must say, I was unexpectedly impressed by it. I expected this program to be a superfluous add-on to Windows' preexisting text-to-speech voice library - a collection of voices which, even in 2009, all sound like David Lightman's home computer from the 1983 film, WarGames.

During the test I conducted, the realism of the voices, as well as the voice engine supplied in this software genuinely surprised me. Although there were occasionally some very acceptable errors, most of which occurred in the pronunciation of foreign terms which are commonly used in English, such as "faux pas," the sentences flowed much better than those of any other program I had heard before. Even the pitch and intonation of the voices adjusts itself accordingly when you compare the imperative with the interrogative. For example, when adding a question mark to the end of a question in a sentence read by Windows' signature voice, Microsoft Sam, would result in a painfully heightened pitch and an almost indiscernible jumble of words, AT&T Natural Voices adjusts the intonation in a way that is very natural and pleasantly received.

I would go as far as to say that using this program reassured me that there are still advances being made in speech synthesis, as it had seemed to be at a stand still for so long. I would highly recommend this program to anyone looking for a more natural speech synthesis application.