Text To Speech for e-Learning

Text to speech technology has come along way from when I first heard a computer speak. The following video is a TED speech by Roger Ebert. Roger lost the ability to speak, and for that matter eat, when he lost his lower jaw to cancer a few years ago. For part of his speech he is using the Alex voice on his Macbook. Take a listen. It's not bad, but still far from perfect.

I've learned that one of the difficulties is the fact that a computer doesn't breath. In addition to naturally pauses indicated in sentences by commas, we also pause elsewhere in our speech to simply account for our need as humans to breathe. I have been experimenting with this in Adobe Captivate's voice narration capabilities. the North American voices included with the product are from a company called Neospeech. Their voices use a text to speech programming language known as VTML. In addition to the text you want to be spoken, you can include VTML tags which will indicate items like speed, pitch, pauses, and a few other items. As I experiment with this, I find my narrative is sounding less and less like a robot and more and more human. It's not perfect, but it is getting better.