>New speech software can make you say words you never spoke
>
>    By Lisa Guernsey
>    NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
>
>    AT&T Labs will start selling speech software that it says is so good
>    at reproducing the human voice that it can re-create voices and even
>    bring the voices of long-dead celebrities back to life.
>
>    The software, which turns printed text into synthesized speech, makes
>    it possible for a company to use recordings of a person's voice to
>    utter new things that the person never said.
>
>    The software, called Natural Voices, is not flawless. There are still
>    a few robotic tones and unnatural inflections. But some who have
>    tested the technology say it is the first such product likely to
>    replicate a human voice where the human ear cannot tell the
>    difference.
>
>    Potential customers for the software, which is priced in the thousands
>    of dollars, include telephone call centers, companies that make
>    software that reads digital files aloud, and makers of
>    voice-activiated devices.
>
>    Scientists say the technology is not yet good enough to perpetrate
>    fraud.
>
>    To build the software that re-creates voices -- AT&T Labs is calling
>    the product its ``custom-voice'' product -- a person must first go to
>    a studio and record 10 hours to 40 hours of readings. The recordings
>    are then chopped into fragments of sounds and sorted into databases.
>    When the software processes a text, it retrieves the sounds and
>    assembles them to form new sentences.
>
>    In the case of long-dead celebrities, archival recordings could be
>    used in the same way.
>
>    Others, including IBM Research and Lernout and Hauspie, are also
>    experimenting with the technique. It is a big step up, engineers say,
>    from the speech engines built from whole words that had been
>    pre-recorded. And it is also a vast improvement, some say, from the
>    computer-generated product used in many versions of text-to-speech
>    software today.


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html