I came across a useful site today that can read out texts in many languages and voices, including Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. While I’ve seen similar text-to-speech sites for languages like English, Spanish, French and German, this is the first one I’ve found that can read Arabic, Czech, Polish, etc.
This text-to-speech site can also handle Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and has avatars reading the text.
The quality of the speech on these sites varies – for some languages it sounds fairly natural, for others it sounds artificial. It also seems to depend on the texts you use.
Here are some samples:
すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等である。人間は、理性と良心を授けられてあり、互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。
모든 인간은 태어날 때부터 자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에 있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부적으로 이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로 형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.
There is an Irish text-to-voice program with an Ulster accent that was developed several years ago, at Trinity I think. It’s probably still on line, ach diabhal a fhios agam anois cén t-ainm atá air!
I actually stumbled upon the second site a few days ago. Before that I only knew of ones for English
Well, the Arabic version seems fair, but not quiet good with the vowels I would say, and also with some glottal stops or connected definite article “al.” I would say it is useful for shorter sentences if needed. Overall rating from my side to the Arabic text-to-speech would be like 70%.
I thought the Arabic sounded fairly good, altho there was a kind of robotic or computer like rythym. I could detect as tho it sounded like words read in isolation then strung together to make this sentence.
The Japanese and Korean sound completely natural to me- In fact, I could imagine the Japanese voice being, say, a typical radio newscast on NHK. 🙂 The Polish (I assume- It looks like Polish to me) and Arabic both sound robotic- Especially the Arabic version.
d.m.f.
The Arabic does indeed sound stilted but the pronunciation is good (although the intonation is bad).