That's why I use Acapela Box (www.acapela-box.com), which is an online pay-per-word TTS service.

They have none of these restrictions and even promoted my video "Shootout", which features their voices.

---

Yeah, I have checked out Acapela Box... I use the professional voices that come with Captivate to create the soundtracks I need for CrazyTalk.

Cheers!

-don

I purchased two sets of two voices from neo and another I can't think of now. I paid an average of $35 per voice from memory.

That enabled 'private viewings only'

If I wanted to upload content to Youtube (publishing UNLISTED only) it would have cost me an additional $70.00 per voice.

To go fully commercial. ... Pretty much unrestricted publish where you like - Around $1100+ per voice.

Considering I purchased 4 voices in total and would have liked another 4 so I had a pool of 8 voices to draw on ... I would have gone broke.

I'm ashamed to admit it but I feel rather foolish in not having checked the terms thoroughly before I purchased the voices (caveat emptor!!).

T'is a shame really - Whilst far from perfect they are a big improvement over the standard MS TTS voices. - Great for putting together a previz-ish version of content one would think.

..Without the ability to publish/display the output .... What's the point?

"Tok39Larraby (5/6/2014)

---

I purchased two sets of two voices from neo and another I can't think of now. I paid an average of $35 per voice from memory.

That enabled 'private viewings only'

If I wanted to upload content to Youtube (publishing UNLISTED only) it would have cost me an additional $70.00 per voice.

To go fully commercial. ... Pretty much unrestricted publish where you like - Around $1100+ per voice.

Considering I purchased 4 voices in total and would have liked another 4 so I had a pool of 8 voices to draw on ... I would have gone broke.

I'm ashamed to admit it but I feel rather foolish in not having checked the terms thoroughly before I purchased the voices (caveat emptor!!).

T'is a shame really - Whilst far from perfect they are a big improvement over the standard MS TTS voices. - Great for putting together a previz-ish version of content one would think.

..Without the ability to publish/display the output .... What's the point?
"

This has been bounced-about quite a bit over the past couple of years.

Some Terms & Conditions can be construed as Unfair & have been adjudged as such. IMO, Neospeech fall into that bracket.

I've been using a what is now Neospeech TTS Voice for many years, used in iClone Productions published on various Websites & will continue to do-so. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

      REALLUSION FORUM ANNUAL PINHEAD COMMUNITY PROJECTS.

       New Pinhead Website & Project to be announced in September 2015

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Hello,

I was investigating what's new on the TTS field and commercial use of voices and found that Amazon Polly is now offering reasonable price for former Ivona voices and it can be used commercially.
Do you know if any other from the big players (Acapela, Nuance, ...) did some price redutcion as a reaction on Polly? If I have to decide whether to use Polly for a few bucks or probably higher quality Acapela voices (at least in some languages) but for hunders of dollars for one voice, the decicions is quite simple.

Petr

I haven't looked at Polly in depth, but it's attractive.

In the past I have used Acapela Box, which is an on-line service with Acapela voices, so you can pay as you go and don't have usage restrictions. I haven't looked if they have gone down in price.

Standalone voices are expensive and have usage restrictions. Nuance in particular is notorious for that, so I would avoid them.

---

This is my observation of what I found about the TTS online sites and is just my opinion and is meant as an informative look into TTS online services.

I took a look at Avatar TTS, Acapela Box and Amazon Polly to see which one would be the cheapest to use with at least above par in voice quality for an average 5 minute scene, that would be one avatar speaking for 5 minutes. 

I my opinion the results are obviously in favor of Amazon Polly which has par to above par voices and gives the user the option of using SSML tags to customize and control things such as pronunciation, volume, speech rate, etc., at a cost of around $0.02 for the five minute MP3. With their "Free Tier" you can essentially get one year of service for free.  There is no limitation on software to use them on or any other usage costs.  AWS is a little too techy for some people but I've used their services for a lot of years and if I can figure it out anyone can!  PRICES

Reallusion's Avatar TTS is the next cheapest to use depending on the package you buy, (you do the math), you can change the pitch and speed of the voice but the voice quality is about the same as Acapela Box, a little more robotic than what I found with Amazon Polly.  Avatar TTS has other features I haven't mentioned here but you can only use the MP3's in iClone, CrazyTalk, or CrazyTalk Animator. PRICES

Acapela Box with par to below par voices at an average cost of $40 for the five minute MP3 so I stopped there.  PRICES

Hope this helps others looking for TTS information.


Dell XPS 8900, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3408 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s), 16 GB RAM, - 4 GB GeForce GTX 745, NVIDIA compatible.
Acer Aspire V Nitro Laptop,  2.5GHz Intel Core i5-7300HQ processor with 6MB cache,  256GB solid state drive, 16GB Ram,  4 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics.

Acapela Box has options to have the same thing said in different ways (although there is no systematic way in which they occur) and there are also a number of tags to control speed and volume. Acapela Box has also a few voices with a bit more expression, and a library of utterances such as "Hey" or "Stop".

None of the voice services seem to have heard of exclamation marks...

The big plus of Polly is that you can change the pitch of individual words and thus render the expression more to your liking. However, I found the US English male voice disappointing, so my male characters will have to speak British English. The price is of course hard to beat and Amazon promises that they will keep improving.

For my last film I used real voices, but during the production of the animation I used TTS to get a feel of the dialog. If it didn't sound right it was easy to change rather than having to go back to voice actors early on.

---