[MUD-Dev2] [Technology] Lend your ears to science!

[Mike Rozak]

As many of you know, I'm a fan of using text-to-speech for CRPG/MMORPG/IF games, particularly NPC speech... basically because TTS is a LOT cheaper than hiring voice talent, AND TTS can speak anything generated at run-time.

Every year, text-to-speech researchers around the world enter a friendly competition called the Blizzard Challenge (not related to Blizzard, the company). To test the quality of their voices, the researchers provide a public listening test (which is where you come in).

Participating researchers and companies are given approximately 10 hours of recordings of a real person, and told to generate a voice from the recordings.

Please participate in this year's listening test at:

    http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/blizzard/blizzard2009/english/register-ER.html

If you know Mandarin, you can also try this test with a Mandarin speaker:

    http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/blizzard/blizzard2009/mandarin/register-MR.html

The overall test is divided into eight sub-tests. Each sub-test has you listen to around 20 sentences. Each sentence is from a different text-to-speech engine, with one sentence being the original speaker. You will be asked to rate the quality of each sentence or type in what you think was spoken.

Some of the TTS engines are fairly poor. Some are quite good (IMHO that is; you be the  judge). While you're listening to the tests, imagine using the better TTS engines in your game.


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