German Voice Pack (SAPI) for use at Captivate 6

[Training_Producer]

Hello everybody,

We need to produce an e-learning course in several languages. Neo speech provides some languages but no german voice.

I need 2 female and 2 male voices. Or at least 1 female voice.

I considered buying a voice pack at another company. I found out about 3 companies.

Do they work as integrated voices inside captivate?

Here are the companys I found out:

http://www.cereproc.com

http://www.acapela-group.com/

http://www.ivona.com

Is it right, that when they have MS SAPI, then it would work?

Because we have thousand of changes, it is not possible to record audio in a studio and it is also not comfortable to generate the voices on a stand alone tool.

Are there other companies for this?

Thanks in advance for you response!

Best regards,

Janet

[VikramGaur]

Hello,

Welcome to Adobe Forums.

Once they give you MSI api, just double check with them : Will it work with Adobe Captivate ?

API should install Text to Speech for windows (Under Speech Properties, Speech Recognition under Control Panel)

You can also take a look for Neo Speech & Loquendo.

Thanks,

Vikram

[saffrondbull1970]

Where can you safely download Loquendo? Checked online but can't find any. Thanks!

[JP Cornelissen]

Janet,

Not sure if you already had an answer, but I just did some research for Germen voices too and in the end I found that only http://www.cereproc.com could provide voices that work with Adobe Captrivate 6.

• http://www.ivona.com: I installed the demo and Captivate 6 does see the voices and allows you to assign them to the TTS sentences. However, when it comes to generating the audio, Captivate picks up the voice that is selected in the control panel » speech section. That's fine if you need a single voice in your project, but if you want a dialog between two or more persons then you have a problem. I have sent an email to query their support for a solution but did not receive a reply.
• http://www.neospeech.com: I have seen topics here in the forum where people say it works. Unfortunately they have very few voices and German is not one of them.
• http://www.loquendo.com: I believe this is the provider of the English voices that come with Captivate 6. I searched their website for a demo or a store to purchase more voices and I couldn't find it. I only found a few pages that say they are now part of Nuance with a broken link to their TTS solutions.
• http://www.nuance.com: like Loquendo, I can't find any page with a TTS demo or a store to purchase more voices. I have sent them an email weeks ago and never received a reply.
• http://www.acapela-group.com: you can't buy from them directly, their website sends you to third party resellers. I visited the website of 2 resellers in my country (Netherlands) but again, I couldn't find a page with a demo or store to purchase.

So, the only provider left for me is http://www.cereproc.com. On their website you can quicly find, purchase and download a voice. All you need to do then is install the voice, enter the license and (re-)start Captivate.

Hope this helps

John-Pierre Cornelissen

[Training_Producer]

Dear John-pierre,

I decided to buy the voices from the acapela group (infovox 3). They were the cheapest and the best voices for german. The others i can not  judge. The german reseller was quite nice. But the demovoices are at the acapella page.

After I installed the voices they show up at speechpanel at captivate but they dont work. So when I let them speak a sentence captivate uses the standard microsoft voice. The other voices of neospeech work fine.

But the standalone speech creator tool works perfect. It creates mp3 files to import. And they also have a pronounciation tool as well. That works very good and sound fine.

But I really would like to have the voices inside captivate working.

SAPI 4 and 5 voices are activated. They are shown at the speechmanagement panel but they are not used by captivate to create the voices.

Does anybody know how to make this work?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Janet

[JP Cornelissen]

Hi Janet,

Looks Acapella voices have the same problem as Ivona then. I contacted Ivona about this (because their voice quality is a bit better then Cereprocs) but that didn't help much. First they said it's an Adobe problem, when I replied saying that Cereproc voices work they said that they must have a special agreement with Adobe (I don't think they have as they don't even mention this compatablity on their website). The 'proof' they gave is that the Windows voice Anna also doesn't work in Captivate if it is not set as the default Windows voice. Then they asked me if I contacted Adobe support about this. I didn't because voices from another supplier work, so to me it's something Ivona needs to figure out with Adobe directly.

Anyway, I guess SAPI5 is not correctly implemented in the voice when it doesn't work in Captivate as expected. It's probably best if you contact the voice supplier.

Regards

JP

[Training_Producer]

Hallo John-pierre,

thanks for the quick respons. I contacted the supplier as you suggested.

I hope they give me an advise.

Thanks so far.

I let you know what they say.

Best regards,

Janet