Adding Voice To Customised Robots

[Randetron]

Hi all,

A couple of years ago I modified an existing commonly found plastic robot (Tommy the Atomic) and added a voice announcement for Joe K.'s Toy Robot Museum.

This primitive first attempt had a cheap mp3 player and a small audio amplifier to drive the speaker.

To simplify things, John Rigg suggested I find a Yahoo Hit Clips player on Ebay and use that to rec/play the announcement. I did buy a Yahoo Downloader but haven't done the mod yet.

My question is this:

The existing announcement is my voice but I'd like to change that to sound more synthesized or "robotic" if you know what I mean. Are there any inexpensive kits out there that would accomplish this?

I did find such a device but the sound quality was horrible.

Ideally, and what would really be neat is if I could just type the announcement on my keyboard and have a program that would change typed words into audio.

Any of you electronic geniuses out there know of a way to produce a robotic sounding voice that wouldn't set me back big money?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[solaar]

Hi,

there are some free text-to-speech services online where you can just type the text and download the spoken words as a mp3 or wav-file.

Here's a list of some of them:

http://vozme.com

http://say.expressivo.com

=> http://say.expressivo.com/eric/hello_alphadromers

http://www.voiceforge.com/demo/

(many different voices)

http://www.ivona.com

http://www.ivona.com/online/editor.php

http://www.spokentext.net

(registration needed)

If there isn't an explicit download-button (most of them have one) you could just ave a look in the cache-folder of your web-browser.

Any sound file must be first downloaded to your computer before it can be played back. So the last sound file you listened to should also be the newest sound file in the cache folder (but it will probably have some cryptical random name).

With some browsers this procedure is even simpler: E.g.: With Apple's Safari and Google Chrome (which is based on Safari) you can open the "Activities" window and just double click on any item in the list and it will open in a new window. From there you can just save it to whereever you want. Other browsers offer add-ons to reveal a list of all resources that are used by the web page you're currently viewing, allowing you to save them or to just drag and drop them to your desktop.

An here is a hint of how to download the files from http://www.voiceforge.com/demo/:

(This service has the most voices, but no downloadbutton, nor do the files show up easily.)

Some browsers offer a view to the resources used by any web page your're viewing. E.g.: Safari and Chrome: Go the preferences and activate the "developer" menu. From this menu choose "web informations" and go the "resources" tab. (Other browsers do also have this feature, for some you may have to install an add-on, e.g.: Firebug for Firfox)

Here you should see a list of the images and other files of the page. If you're hitting the "Play"-button, there should be a new entry "http://www.voiceforge.com/demo/demo.cgi" or short "/demo.cgi" at the end of the list.

The content of this URL is a XML-file containing the location of the sound-file:

E.g.: <param name='src' value='http://vf3.voiceforge.com/audio/b3d3d5bdb052713ca63aa5b910acbff7.mp3'>

=> Copy the address given in the "value" attribute inside the quotes and paste it in the location/addresspane of a new window. Now you should be able to save this file.

[Randetron]

Thank you, solaar!

I'll definitely be looking into the links you provided.