SPEECH TECHNOLOGY

Hi! Today I’m going to talk you about a computer program: loquendo. Surely most of you have watched some videos made with it, but you didn’t know the name of the program. With this program you write a text and then it pronounces it. You can choose different voices from different countries, each one with a typical accent, men and women.

I think it’s a very useful tool for mute people, because it can express laughs, sadness and other emotions. Now there is a renewed version, but it still needs to advance a lot to reproduce faithfully the human voice.

But it’s got another use: People make videos and they post them in the youtube, and these videos sometimes are jokes or parodies. They make fun of some stupid things like TV serials or social topics.

Here I put a video made with loquendo. In this case, they have used a Spanish voice, simulating it’s learning English.

In the web page of the program there is a demo. You can write a text and then download the audio file.



There’s a software in Windows that wants to do the same, but it’s disastrous. It’s called Sam, and it only speaks in English, but his voice is very strange and sometimes the pronunciation is very bad.