I downloaded the demo and had it running today. I ran it through most of my voice announcement events.
The voice is different and does pronounce some phrases clearer than AT&T Crystal. But I also found that Heather slurs words together on some phrases that Crystal did not. Let me give some examples.
One of my phrases is "Family room window opened". Crystal always pronounced it like "
FAMly room window opened" with a significant accent on the first syllable in Family (very annoying). Heather pronounced this a lot clearer with no significant accent mistake.
For my phone call announcement I have the phrase "Call From", then the caller's name. Heather pronounced this like it was one word (callfrom) and you could barely make out the "ffff" sound of the "f" in from.
One thing I did notice is that it makes a LOT of difference what kind of quality audio/sound system you play Heather on in how she sounds. My home announcements use an Elk Amplifier and the cheap Elk Speakers. My Homeseer PC has a Labtech speaker (middle road quality) in my den. In cases where I thought she was running words together I noticed that this was not as significant a problem when I was listening to her on my Homeseer (better) speakers.
I never noticed this problem with Crystal. I also noticed when background noise was high, Heather was less clear.
These reasons
may explain why some people did not think Heather was significantly better than Crystal.
I did not notice a performance difference with either voice (running a dedicated Homeseer machine on an AMD 1.33 Ghz with 512 MB DDR @ 266Mhz FSB). I did notice for this script:
Code:
hs.speak "The dryer has finished, , , , , , , , , , , , The dryer has finished", FALSE
Heather had a few seconds delay between the phrases where Crystal did not. (Maybe that is the performance difference people are talking about??)
One other thing I noticed with Heather was the significant "British Like" accent. Everyone noticed it in my family. I personally have nothing against British sounding people, but I found this a little strong for my tastes for this first day (I guess you could say; "not my cup of tea").
I'm going to run through the 30 day demo and leave comments as I test this voice out. All in all I would say it's good, but also has different flaws that Crystal did not, so its not the "Holy Grail" of voices, but it is good. Price would be a very significant deciding factor for purchase this voice!
Another thing I noticed with fellow members, it seems that sound and sight are very subjective. What looks and sounds "good" to one person may not to another. (This is why its tough describing video quality to people as well).
Well that's enough
babbling for now!
BSR
