Hi,
I have to agree with you Chris. The real Samantha's voice is much nicer. I'm guessing a lot of these actors, when recording TTS voices, spoke in a very controled, flat manner. In a sense, that's a good thing. But it leaves for less interesting, less atractive expression (and by attractive, I don't mean sexy). I love Tom's voice though, the real one and the synth are both very good. Daniel isn't bad either.
As for Eloquence, I believe that all voices were created from male and female models for each language. I remember using an old Supernova where you could adjust Eloquence settings and if I remember right, when creating a custom voice, you could only choose male or female as the voice type, and from there you'd have to adjust peramitors. I know Dectalk works this way... just one male and one female model with many peramitors. Any other voices were just made by modifying the peramitors of the models... for example, Paul is the model of Dennis Klat and Harry is Paul with lower pitch and lower head size. Doctor Dennis is Paul with lower pitch, slightly lower head size and more breathiness... you get the picture. And there are others, some are more simple or complicated than others.
I'd be very, very interested to have more for concatonative synths... for example Acapela, Ivona, and At&t (like Mike and Crystal, and others).
Cepstral William is the voice of the guy who heads Cepstral, though the two sound nothing alike... I'm guessing he wasn't using his normal voice when recording William. I like his normal voice better... the recording was on an old ABC Main Menu archive, which has been down for a few years now. The quality isn't great... it's hard to believe that the two are the same person.
And a few years back, I heard the actor who did Acapela Ryan on a commercial, or at least someone who sounded a lot like him. Damn I wish I could get another sample of that. I like Ryan's voice, it would be awesome to hear the real person. And of course anything else related to this topic is very interesting, so keep it up! Hmm maybe just edit the first post of the topic when you get more info?
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
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