Posted by F
Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:25:00 GMT
A co-worker pointed me to AT&T Natural Voices, a Text-to-Speech research
project from AT&T. I tried
the online demo and I’m
really impressed.
It’s been a long while since I last tried a TTS system, so may be I’m
just late to the party… but this one produces very natural speech. I
tried a couple of English and Spanish voices, and all seem very real.
I knew about the
Festival project, which
provides a free speech synthesis system, but if you check the online voice
demos you will probably agree that it’s not on par with AT&T’s.
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Posted by F
Tue, 01 Nov 2005 21:45:00 GMT
I just realized about an interesting move from Oracle. They released a
Beta version of their new Oracle Database 10g Express
Edition.
This Express edition is free of charge. It is free not only for
production use, but also for distribution.
These are the limitations it has:
- It restricts itself to use only one CPU
- Only one server and database instance (SID) per installation
- Database size limit of 4GB
Looks like a good deal for ISVs,
developers and small shops. It’s a good way for getting more
mind-share among small software companies and younger/future
developers.
I tried it on my Linux laptop and got it up and running in a couple of
minutes. The Express name does not make it any lighter though: it
still consumes a good chunk of RAM, and the database instance
allocates 1GB of disk. So I’ll stick to PostgreSQL for powering this blog :-).
Read more...
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