Digital Workshop

Greetings everyone

I'm thinking about developing a short experimental computer based training course to trial on my Chinese university students next year. The current course that is being used is very good but the level of English used in the course is very high and the amount of engagement built into the lessons is basic and minimal and I think there is a lot of room for improvement.

The course I have in mind will be written in English and will have quite a lot of simple English reading in it.

What I would like to do is to put the English text through a text to speech application and record the conversion as a sound file. This sound file would then be embedded on the applicable page in the publication so if the student desires, he or she can play the file and listen to the text in speech form.

Opus includes an autonarration function but I just don't have a good recordable voice and the cost of getting voice talent to record the text is out of the scope of this project.

I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is any software out there that A. does a reasonable job of making half decent text to speech conversions which can be recorded and replayed in publications and B. Has a licence that allows one to do this.

Thanks

Graham

Hi Graham,

Using synthetic voices requires an Audio Distribution Licence which works about between 1/3 and 2/3 of the cost of voice talent - about £200 p/h - I believe.

There is an excellent piece of software called Balaolka (freeware) that would allow you to save TTS if you purchased an ADL for your voice of choice.

Alternatively, some products like Adobe Captivate, I believe - but please check, include TTS capabilities with the purchase of the product. What the distribution rights are - I don't know.

When I built a simulation last year for a Special Educational Needs college, I used a DLL to add TTS to Opus and use the client's machine's own voices - thus avoiding licensing and allowing the client to choice different voices.

http://www.live.interaktiv.co.uk/index. ... Itemid=166

Mack

Thankyou for taking the time to answer my post Mack.

I saw your excellent dll solution and thought about this for a while.

The problem is that apart from a common operating system, it seems that every computer in the classroom where I'm planning to test my publication has different bits and pieces of software on each of them along with a healthy collection of virusii and torjans etc. No computer is the same so I can't be sure there are voice files on them at all.

Your answer confirmed what I thought might be the case but I haven't given up just yet - will do a bit more searching.

Have reverted to the old autonarrate feature but that seems to have it's quirks as well. Have posted about this in the standard Opus forum.

Thank you again for your kind help

Graham

And I thought the Chinese had the most up-to-date versions of all the West's software

One idea I liked was rather than hiring a professional voice talent is to speak to the local high schools / colleges as they probably have their own media studios and some willing Thespians happy to earn some extra cash at a much better rates than the pros.

Mack

Captivate does have text to speech capabilities. I have used Text Aloud before and it is good. There was a recent article out on the elearingguild, I believe, that stated that most people did not like TTS but preferred a human voice.