Serving Robot
A Noises Off Resource
Text To Speech Tools
Text to Speech (TTS) has been around for a long time – just think of Stephen Hawkings – but it has been improving at a terrifying rate. I do think that humans are still irreducibly necessary to art-making, and if artificial intelligences ever become minds capable of the work you’re doing, then they’ll be people and we will need to summon some morality as a species and not enslave them. In the meantime, we can vote for politicians who will stop corporations from hoarding the profits they make from stealing our shit.
That said, we do have access now to some fancy machines that can take a text and convert it into speech in accent. They do a good enough job that we can use this tool to help us practice. They mostly offer a free tier, and a paid tier, but I think you can get something useful out of the paid tier. Let’s look at a few:
Elevenlabs has RP and Cockney voices and small chunks of accented speech can be converted for free. Here are a couple of examples:
LIZZIE
EASTEND STEVE
ISADORA HOUSE
And, weirdly, you can even upload your own picture and watch your own face speaking in this accent…
https://www.naturalreaders.com/ is another possibility. Here is some text in RP:
But of course there are a fuctillion TTS websites, and it might be worth spending a little time trying them out.
Here are a couple. If you happen to find a good one, let me know. For now, I’ll start the list here: