Looks interesting, and less of a corporate hastle than Cepstral would be, based on my asking them about it.
I'm actually trying to work off of audio cassettes as well as higher quality recordings (not for the same voice, of course!), so the quality would be pretty poor from the get-go. I'm willing to stand that, but so far companies offering voice creation sound extremely reluctant to accept low-quality stuff (Cereproc's FAQ makes me think it has to do with how those would reflect on the company). And considering the inevitable low quality, the prices involved with getting pros to do it is pretty frightening, to say the least.

Cereproc's system looks like the best for what I want to do (assuming sound quality and cost weren't an issue).
On the other hand, Festival is free--but trying to install it makes my head continually melt and solidify. T.T

[edit] Ick. I finally got Festival to work (I managed to track down a windows version that someone else had somehow managed to compile). Now if I could just figure out how to get from there to making a voice with festvox. [/edit]

...

So, the username on my computer (windows Vista) is two words with a space in between.
After a fairly tedious dance with trying to compile things in Cygwin, I get errors that strongly imply that the space is a problem. This is consistent with things I've encountered somewhere else (I forget the context and so forth).

I've tried making a new directory in cygwin/home that removes the spaces... doesn't work.

I try looking for a discussion forum or list or something specifically for issues related to festival. And I find one. And... ... it has a capcha.

Gonna go take out my frustration on dead treebranches, now.

[edit] Finally discovered TTS Builder, which supposedly uses the festival system, but without all the head-explosion. Catch being that... the download links are all dead. -_-
Anyway to do this that doesn't require either thousands of dollars or a PHD in Linux?[/edit]

That is not easy, I'm afraid.

If you google tts builder, you'll find many download sites.
The problem is that most of them link to research-labs, which seems to have either changed hands, or is acting like tts builder never existed.
I found one mirror of an older version, but it's watered down so much that it only lets you use their built in voice to speak things. In other words, it's pointless.

Considering that the company behind it seems to have ceased to support it (if indeed they still exist at all), I looked at what was claiming to be a cracked version, which turned out to be a trojan.

So, basically, you can't get it anymore, unless some random person has it somewhere obscure.

I gave up on the experts and decided to just make my own custom tts program. Using BGT, since that's where I'd be most likely to use it. Clearly it's not going to be very good, but eh.

What about ModelTalker? It's annoying and pretty gargly even for human sampled voices, but if all you want to do is make a voice, it should work.

PS:
I agree Festival's method of making voices is somewhere around NASA level coding...
Edit: Also, what about using the Cached link for that one forum you found about Festival, assuming you used Google to find it? Not all results have this but it's saved me a few times so I don't have to make dummie accounts to access information.

SG

Here is the problem though. It's not accessible!