In our continuing efforts to ferret out speech solutions that help you express l’amour to that special Speech Head in your life, we stumbled on this.
EasyJet, a British, low-cost, airline carrier, for reasons that are scarcely apparent to my brother, Adam B., or even me, is offering a cute, little, and free text-to-speech message service in French, Message d’Amour. When you get one of these cards, you see a bucolic field. A little rotund orange bird flies in, center screen, and speaks your message in childlike French.
Message is part ad firm 1000mercis’s campaign to ingratiate EasyJet to the ranks of French flyers. I guess they’re hoping if you send a message to your far-off, forever crush–that girl you loved in your Marseilles school days, but who went to London to work as some kind of banker–will get that tender TTS message and write back (in her own TTS, of course) saying, yes, she harbors reciprocal feelings, yes, she’s loved you for your awkward inathletic stumblings on the soccer field since those halcyon école secondaire days, and that you, smitten with the heavy clobber of love’s promise, will remember the good turn EasyJet did you and hop their first flight to London, regardless of cost, and form a long-distance relationship that requires an endless booking of trans-European flights.
A beautiful dream, no?
Under the hood, Message is powered by Acapela’s TTS engine, which is available in 25 languages in 50 voices, both male and female. EasyJet, despite having websites in English, German, and Italian, in addition to French, and despite Acapela being able to service those languages, hasn’t created analogous service for any of them. Only French, which I suppose is wholly appropriate for Valentine’s Day, it being the “language of love.”
Popular rumor even has it that the Parisian municipal government pays attractive young couples to neck in public so as to retain the city’s image as the “World Capital of Love.” I haven’t been able to corroborate that rumor with any evidence, by the way, but even if it’s not true, it goes to a kind of truism about French PDA. If you’ve ever been to Paris and seen these ubiquitous couples on benches, you know what I’m talking about.
In any case, even if you don’t speak French, Message d’Amour can still provide you with hours of fun because the engine is so good that if you cheat the spelling, you can send English messages in outrageous French accent. Just remember to separate the phonemes with commas and spaces when needed and to spell things like dear as dee air.
Try your own! And let us know about it.
Bon apetit, Speech Heads.
