Man, I wish I hadn't just snapped the mic off my pocket voice recorder. Today I got a hilarious call from a robotic telemarketer. Apparently hoping to add impact, the programmer set its speech synth to use a British accent. The greeting went something like this:
Hello David. This is Ian from the university. If there's one thing holding you back, it's your lack of a college degree.
I typed that phrase into a handful of online speech synths to try to track down the voice. (If there's one thing holding me back, it's probably my curiosity.) The closest match I found was Acapela Peter:
- Hello, David (68KB MP3)
Compare that to the uncultured American voice you get by clicking the "listen" link above. Are British robots more persuasive? I remember hearing, perhaps at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, that German GPS devices don't use female voices because Germen men don't like to take directions from women, but maybe that's an urban legend.
For more on speech synths, see Digital Media Insider Podcast 3: Singing Computers.
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Read More Entries by David Battino.
@Chris: Thanks for clearing that up! But what if the German GPS women speak with a British accent?
David,
It's an urban legend.
Greetings from Germany
Chris