How did Microsoft create Sam, Mike, & Mary? Like the SAPI4 and SAPI5 versions of their voices?
We don't work for Microsoft.
Read through this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_text-to-speech_voices
How did Microsoft create Sam, Mike, & Mary?
c# - Microsoft Sam, SAPI alternatives - Stack Overflow
Is SAM (Text to Speech) free to use commercially?
Who provided their voices for the windows xp sam, mike and mary tts voices?
Videos
On Windows about the best I have found was using the speech API and voices from AT&T Natural Voices: https://nextup.com/attnv.html They are however VERY expensive if available at all. I have run into projects where the usage/business model was so far from what AT&T was thinking of that they wouldn't even sell a license.
There is a free software alternative, Festival: http://festvox.org/ , the quality though is horrible. It is about 10 years behind the current sound quality of commercial systems. It is however free.
A third alternative which has worked well for me was to shift the voice synthesis part of a few projects to OS X. OS X has a decent set of tools and speech APIS and a fairly decent set of stock voices. The downside of course is that prorams written for these APIs run only under OS X which runs only on Apple hardware.
AT&T Natural Voices engine produces great speech but its not free
there is also NeoSpeech which are also good - Not free as well
I'm not entirely sure how to phrase my question properly, so I'm not sure if I make sense. I'm not that familiar with the Commodore 64, so I figured I'd ask here. Maybe my reasoning below could further explain what I mean.
I have an idea for a video and want to use the C64 SAM voice module (I like how it sounds), but I'm not sure if there's some kind of copyright protection associated with it or if it's a public domain/CC0 thing.
I googled it and that brought me here, still answerless.
I make this question because i saw many comedic youtube videos using the sam, mike and mary tts voices from windows xp's narrator app in the past and i really wanted to know since this year. Does somebody from the microsoft team know?
No one from Microsoft ever looks at these XP forums.
And support for XP ended in 2014.
But if you had a problem with running XP, we would attempt to help you.
I suggest that you use Google for your query.