Let me be honest: a lot of synthetic speech sounds a little odd, mostly due to the breaking syllables that sometimes occur when you hear an automated voice. It’s probably the most robot-like aspect of speech, and it doesn’t just sound weird, it can also be less clear or just plain distracting. There have, however, been many improvements to automated speech recently.
Google Translate just announced that it will attempt to improve it’s speech synthesis by using Phonetic Art’s products. While google already supports many languages including Czech, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. With the new improvement, Google will also release translation capabilities for Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.
You can hear the new speech synthesis on Google Translate. Go to google and type ‘google translate’ and click on the link. I admit it sounds good–less breaking of syllables so you get more hello and less hell-o.
I would just like to point out that the new improved speech synthesis on Google Translate is from SVOX and not from Phonetic Art’s.