Text2Speech Voices

UpStage’s speech is generated by the Festival Speech Synthesiser, developed at the Centre for Speech Technology Research at Edinburgh University (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/).

An avatar's voice is selected from a dropdown menu when adding a new avatar and changed in the "Manage avatars" section (see section 3.2.3). There are currently about 100 voices on the UpStage server (http://upstage.org.nz:8084); if you are setting up your own UpStage server, please see the technical documentation regarding installing voices.

Voices currently available on UpStage

The voices currently available with UpStage have a filenaming system that describes what kind of voice each one is. Some of the voices speak English in a foreign accent, some speak English in various English accents, and some are designed to speak other languages. The software defaults to a male voice, but we have endeavoured to make female versions of most voices.

You can test the voices on the Avatar Edit screen, by selecting different voices from the drop down menu and entering the text you want to test. 

The format is: ["e" or "emb"] _ [native language] - [en] - [modifications]

For example:

e_de – speaks and reads German

e_en – speaks and reads English

e_en-fast-f1 – speaks English quickly, in a female voice

e_en-wm – speaks english in a west midland accent. 

Other accents in the e_en series are "n" for north, "sc" for Scots, "rp" for RP, "r" for rhotic (which means it pronounces the r in words like church).

emb_af1 – speaks and reads Afrikaans

emb_af1-en – speaks English in an Afrikaans accent

emb_de4-en-low-slow – speaks english, lowly and slowly, in a german accent

We are in the process of compiling descriptions for all the voices; following is the information so far:

Adding more voices

You can install additional speech plug-ins on your own server to extend the range of voices available to the avatars. As long as you don't mind messing around with the sourcecode a little bit it's not difficult – Patricia Jung explains how she did it (for Linux, using UpStage V1 - note that this is now several years old):