• Introduction
• UpStage v3
• Introduction
• UpStage Team
• Technical Information
• How to Help UpStage
• Audience
• Audience View
• Audience Chat
• Audience Interactivity
• Players
• Logging In
• Player Profile
• Player View
• On-stage Player Tools
• Avatar Tools
• Audio Palette
• Drawing Palette
• Speech and Text Chat
• / Commands
• Media Management
• The Workshop Interface
• Creating and Editing Players
• Creating and Editing Stages
• Uploading Media
• Browse Media
• Edit Media
• Creating Media
• Creating Graphics for UpStage
• Creating Audio for UpStage
• Streaming
• Introduction to streaming
• Video tutorial
• Sending a stream
• Red5 Publisher interface
• FMLE
• VLC (Linux)
• Creating a stream avatar
• Prerecorded streams
• Appendices
• Glossary
• Text2Speech Voices
• Troubleshooting

Text2Speech Voices

UpStage's speech is generated by the Festival Speech Synthesiser, developed at the Centre for Speech Technology Research at Edinburgh University (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/).

An avatar's voice is selected from a dropdown menu when uploading or editing an avatar. There are currently about 100 voices on the Open UpStage server; if you are setting up your own UpStage server, please see the technical documentation regarding installing voices.

Note that at the moment, it is only possible to use characters from the Roman alphabet (including letters with accents such as é, ñ, ø, ü) in the text chat, but not other alphabets such as Cyrillic, Greek, etc.  

Voices currently available on UpStage

The voices currently available with UpStage have a filenaming system that gives a clue as to what kind of voice each one is. Some of the voices speak English with a foreign accent, some speak English with different English accents, and some are designed to speak other languages more-or-less accurately. We have endeavoured to include a good variety of accents as well as male and female voices.

The format is: ["e" or "emb"] _ [native language] - [en] - [modifications]

For example:

• e_de – speaks and reads German
• e_en – speaks and reads English
• e_en-fast-f1 – speaks English quickly, in a female voice
• e_en-wm – speaks english in a west midland accent. 

Other accents in the e_en series are "n" for north, "sc" for Scots, "rp" for RP, "r" for rhotic (which means it pronounces the r in words like church).

• emb_af1 – speaks and reads Afrikaans
• emb_af1-en – speaks English in an Afrikaans accent
• emb_de4-en-low-slow – speaks english, lowly and slowly, in a german accent

We are in the process of compiling descriptions for all the voices; following is the information so far: 

Adding more voices

You can install additional speech plug-ins on your own server to extend the range of voices available to the avatars. As long as you don't mind messing around with the source code a little bit it's not difficult – Patricia Jung explains how she did it (for Linux, using UpStage V1 - note that this is now several years old):