Re: How do they record the actors for voice response systems

["Dana Worley" <dana -at- campbellsci -dot- com>]

On Wednesday, April 01, 2009, Downing, David wrote: 

> There's something I've always wondered about voice response systems,
> and I was wondering if anyone here has had firsthand experience
> constructing one and so could answer my question.

We have voice modems for our dataloggers. You can call into a weather station and 
hear, "Hello. Campbell. Scientific. Weather. Station. The temperature. is..." (the first 
models had fairly halting speech and I still can't get it out of my head ;) )

The first few models of the voice modems were a live voice. We had a woman here with 
a nice voice, and we'd hook her up to a mic and record a word list. She had to try to recite 
the words with as little inflection as possible. We used her for years. Our most recent 
voice modem, however, uses a synthesized voice. It's much easier to create the words 
but they still require some tweaking. And I think it sounds a little more fake than our nice 
lady did :)

We recently upgraded our version of Captivate, and they have improved text-to-speech 
capability. They've done a nice job of it -- the test tutorial that our training person put 
together this week sounded pretty good, and I don't think she'd done any kind of tweaking 
yet.

Dana

***************************
Dana Worley
Software Product Manager/Manager, Software Support Group
Campbell Scientific, Inc. 
Microsoft MVP, Windows Help


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