Hey there!
A lot of you already know about the work being done to make a speech engine for Siberia Complex, and several are participating in our second voice competition, The Sentence II. As promissed in that competition, the speech engine code for our current work will be made public, as Open Source.
And this happens now!
The speech engine, loosely named “Chatter” (or Chad amongst friends) is still fairly basic; this dialog is what is being used in the competition. It still lacks emotional tones in the voices, and it takes a little skill to make them sound as you want them to. The latter is partly because there is no dictionary yet; you write the sounds spoken, not the English words. This does give a lot more control, of course! But with a bit of practice, it matches most minor speech engines out there, including several commercial ones (it actually is now surpassing the small commercial one we use for draft animations!).
Chad is in version 0.6.10, the code generally clean and with basic documentation. It is a single C++ file; no nightmare of file linking! In fact, it seems to be pretty compact, compared to other Open Source ones out there. Hardened programmers will quickly find some redundancies and inefficient code, but it has been cleaned up pretty nicely, IMHO. Version 0.7 will be a near-full rewrite of the code to allow for better voices, more voice variation, and better toning of voices for anger, whispering, etc., so though The Sentence II has a submissions deadline April 30., Chad 0.6.10 is now being released to the public.
Of course, the example sentences included are not those from the competition; those will be released on April 30.!
THE CODE for reading or download. It is in one .txt file, and can thus easily be read online, downloaded, and/or copied into your favorite C++ development environment.
Further documentation, including an introduction to the individual speech sounds in there, will follow in the coming weeks.
VERY IMPORTANT
One shortcut we took in the coding is that the speech engine does not actually create sound files :eek: We used the GoldWave sound editor for much of the research, and the files produced are “numerical sound files”. Goldwave will load them with no trouble, and can save them as standard sound files in the format of your choice (there is even a Batch function under Files. Very fast and VERY nice for complete dialog conversions). If someone wants to write some code to make the engine produce actual sound files, please feel free to do so (hey, it’s Open Source, feel free to do anything. Except selling it; it’s not really yours, remember ;)). If you succeed, please let us know
GoldWave is very cheap, not affiliated with us, and has a very generous trial version. Plus it’s a good program. Check it out.