SUGGESTIONS The best sounding TTS available today?

[Bart]

I want to provide a service where a message in text can be converted to speech (wav) and then played to a caller. All of the text to speech applications I've found so far sound robotic and unnatural.

I hear people using something on YouTube that does a good job, but don't know which app they are using.

I was wondering if any of you have found something you would recommend (commercial or free)

Thanks, Bart

 

[restamp]

While it certainly could not be mistaken for a real person, I use pico to produce canned messages which can then be uploaded. It's free, it's already built and downloadable as a Linux package, and it sounds the least bad of those packages I've tried. I don't see any reason it cannot be invoked directly on the same box you are running Asterisk on. Unfortunately, it has a somewhat screwy command-line interface, something like:

$ pico2wave -w file16.wav "$(<file.txt)" && ffmpeg -i file16.wav -ar 8k file.wav

A small sample of pico output can be found here: http://cboh.org/piaf/keypadtest.wav