Having spent the past few hours crawling the web to no avail I am going to ask this question : Does anybody know of any software, retail, shareware or freeware that will convert written text (natural or phenome (sp?) style) and generate a wav file. Ideally it would be great to be able to tweak the resulting wav file to generate different voices, i.e male, female, sexy female, masculine male, sulty female etc ... Anybody know of any software that does this ?

Attached Link: http://www.winternet.com/~rwaller/nellie/index.html

I have heard of it for the Mac. Check out Reed Waller's "Nellie & The Drummers" site. The software is mentioned there somewhere. http://www.winternet.com/~rwaller/nellie/index.html

Simple Text can do it on the Mac. For the PC there is usually text to speach software that comes with most speach to text programs like Naturally Speaking or Via Voice.

Attached Link: http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/voices.html

Bell Labs a has a site where can do this on-line for free. Type in your words select the voice parameters and you download the wav, au or aiff file. Definately the cheapest altenative. Definately.

Looking for PC solutions to this problem. The link to the www.bell-labs.com above is on the right track. Unfortunately I really want software that will not only allow me to enter text, convert to speech (wav files etc) but also tweak the resultant output into different sounding voices, at this stage primarily females.

Attached Link: http://www.NextUpTech.com/

Check out TextAloud MP3 at link provided. Ed

Attached Link: http://www.glyphscribe.com/nofret/

Check out my site at the attached link. You have to download some components (all standard Microsoft text to speech stuff) but once you do that, Nofret will speak the text you type (unfortunately this is for Egyptian hieroglyphs but there are some phrases you can cut and paste into the text box at the site. There are controls where you can adjust the pitch, speed, and reveberation. This is all done using HTML scripting and an Active-X text to speech component plus the text-to-speech engine you download.

Attached Link: http://www.glyphscribe.com/Nofret/

Sorry the link is case sensitive. Corrected link.

The best i have tried is IBM ViaVoice TTS. You can download a demo, plugs for several languages and a SDK from their web pages. If you download the SDK there is an example program that lets you alter the voices in many different ways. Man, woman, child, alien, you name it. /Ohman

Waller uses a piece of software called VocalWriter (which allows you to combine text and midi files to create sung lyrics) for the Mac. However, the Mac's "Text to Speech" function does not create sound files (you'd have to record the speech externally, and then rerecord it on hard disk). While Quicktime will translate midi files into AIFF files, and SimpleText will read text aloud, and allow you to include sound files into a SimpleText document--they still have no method to transfer text to AIFF, WAV or MP3.

[Mac] ... they still have no method to transfer text to AIFF, WAV or MP3. QuickSpeech

Attached Link: http://www.webnation.com/webtools/quickspeech.html

I stand corrected. Here's the link to Ward and Webnation's QuickSpeech.

Attached Link: http://www.shadisoft.com/speak

Maybe a little late response but you could try shadisoft.com They have an application called speak. You can use the Hausspie voices male and female for this (even in other languages like german and dutch)