Has anyone used the Pose 'n Talk products from Neftis? If so, how do they work with various characters and does it provide any insight to more extensive talking animation. I have LipSinc and am planning to start using it soon. I was hoping that using these programs might help my learning and appreciation of the this aspect of animation. Mick Glant

Pose 'n Talk thing is very limited in scope. Only a few lip synced phrases. As nice as that may be just how versatile can it be? I could see $5 bucks but $15? You're better off buying a texture or something. I have a good FAQ on Mimic on my tutorial site and I hope to put up a textPuppet FAQ soon. I want to fully evaluate it before I put up anything. Mimic and textPuppet really are quite different, though complimentary products. Both are unfortunately for PC though the pose files they generate may be used on either platform. textPuppet is worth buying and doesn't have software protection like Mimic.

Thanks James, I went to your site and will use your tutorials... where is textPuppet sold from? Mick Glant

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

Actually there are a few UK English speech engines available out there but by far the best sounding one has to be by L&H. Hey Jamball, can text puppet import one of these? And also, I looked at Text Puppet and was wondering whose Speech Engine it uses. AT&T currently has a new speech engine in the beta stage that will blow away all the competition. I corresponded with Nextup which has a text to speech app that is beta testing it now. If TextPuppet uses AT&T's current speech engine then its about to get a lot better in the near future.

It uses the IBM Speechworks ETI-Eloquence software for text to speach. But i should think it would be nothing to sync up the wave file from AT&Ts if you prefer another text to speach engine. I know in soundforge it wouldn't take long to be sure that the timing was the same. info@puppetsoft.com They are very responsive with their email support. I'd give them an email to see if they have tried it out on Macs with an emulator.

The Speechworks engine is flexible, but I agree with farang. I've heard samples of the AT&T engine, and it is most impressive.

If you want to try out some good text-to-speech shareware programs, try TextAloud MP3 or CoolSpeech. They can use speech modules from both Microsoft and L&H.

CoolSpeech homepage
TextAloud MP3 link

Nextup is currently beta testing AT&T's upcoming speech engine and the pronunciation editor I'm told is awesome. Here's a link to the site---http://www.nextup.com/TextAloud/attnv.html