High Quality TXT-to-WAV for single words?

[Peter Marvit <marvit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear List,

Perhaps a tad off-topic, but...

Can anyone point me to an inexpensive (or free!) utility under Windows
that will synthesize a high quality voice from single word text, with the
ability to save the result in a WAV file (or other format) so that
subsequent post-processing (with MATLAB and/or Cooledit) can be done?

For an experiment, I would like to use a series of single words that have
some additional processing. I'm currently using speech recorded for the
purpose, but would dearly like to have a bit more uniformity and control
over the stimulus. The Microsoft text-to-speech utility is rather dreadful
(i.e., choppy phonemes, noisy vowels, scratchy tonality) and it seems all
the shareware on Winfiles.com (now cnet) use this engine. I'd like
something better.

Many thanks in advance. You can answer on the list, or send me responses
that I will later summarize.

Cheers,
Peter


:                 Peter Marvit, PhD     <marvit@neu.edu>                    :
: Northeastern University, Dept. of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology :
:               133 Forsyth Building, Boston, MA 02115-5000                 :
:                 phone: 617/373-5198   fax: 617/373-5199                   :