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Google’s Phonetic Arts is one of many online voice synthesizers: Try these out

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Google Inc. announced Friday that it had purchased Phonetic Arts, a British speech synthesis company. Google has been playing with various voice synthesizers for a while, including the ones used by its Google Translate, Google Maps and GOOG-411 software.

As the company said in its announcement, there are bound to me many more applications that will benefit from a voice output feature. If you’re driving and need to know a phone number, say, or you’re cooking and want to hear a list of ingredients, it would be helpful to have the computer read them to you.

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Of course, speech synthesis has been around for decades, and has often made its way into popular culture. Think Stephen Hawking, this recent episode of ’30 Rock,’ or the hilarious Xtranormal bear-pigs, who have lampooned iPhone buyers, federal monetary policy and lately taken a star turn in a Geico commercial.

It’s always fun to play around with text-to-speech synthesizers and make the robot voice say whatever you want. Here are a few that are available around the Web:

VoiceForge: A demo that lets you choose from more than 50 voices of varying genders, ages, and accents.

Xtranormal: Make your own movies with bizarre talking animals

AT&T Labs Natural Voices: Try out more than a dozen different male and female voices with different accents, including Italian, French and German. Lets you download the results.

Acapela: Five male and female voices with British accents.

Google Translate: A number of the 50+ languages Google translates offer a voice version of the translation. Works for English, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese and others.

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Phonetic Arts: The company Google bought -- you can’t do text to speech, but you can hear a few samples of their voices. Impressive!

-- David Sarno

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