Hello everyone!
I’m here to present a new text to speech voice, produced by Blastbay Studios!
With the introduction of cloud neural text to speech, the demand has been sparked for voices that can achieve similar quality while running on your local computer.
I’m happy to say that one large step towards this goal has been achieved. Meet Richard and Libby.
Richard and Libby are text to speech voices that run under Microsoft Windows, with potential support for more operating systems and devices in the future. They respond quickly enough for use with screen readers, while sounding far more natural as compared to other voices that run on your computer.
Unlike with text to speech in the cloud, when you read content with Richard and Libby, you can be assured that your content is private and will only ever be seen by you. The voices do not connect to the internet, and do not share the content you are reading back to the developer. Therefore, you can be assured that your bank statements, private reading, or anything else is yours and yours alone.
Unlike most voices of this caliber, they are sold at an affordable price of $20. This is a one time purchase price, not a subscription. No hidden fees.
You can hear samples, download a trial, and purchase the voices at:
www.blastbay.com
I hope you all enjoy!
By techluver, 20 June, 2025
Forum
Windows
Comments
I plan to try these out and…
I plan to try these out and acquire them at some point. Just heard the voices from audio and they indeed sound great!
hope it can have IOS version as well..
well,
I hope it will have the IOS version and we can use it for voice over's speech...
I don't mind paying for it..
I'd not pay for these voices.
Not because they're bad, they're not, but because in my oppinion I can get the same kind of voices for free when using sapi.
Their advantage seams to be that you can speed them up without losing quality, well; you can do that with the other sapi voices too.
I've read the thread on audiogames.net but am honestly confused as to why these were made. It's a great exersize in learning how to make a TTS but apart from that, I'm stil confused.
Can they inflect like eloquence? Or do they do the same thing as the Sapi voices and just sound flat?
@Brad
Off topic here, but can you tell which interesting sapi voices, well, are interesting? Like aside the old espeak with sapi 4/5 and questionable eloquence I haven't looked or heard about any other interesting voice.
@TheBlindGuy07.
I'd not say there are any voices that are interesting. I've been using eloquence for years and am just used to it.
re: I'd not pay for these voices.
I'm sorry? Sapi you're not really gunna find human sounding voices like these and especially how responsive they are from what I hear. Eloquence sounds nothing like human at all. Don't know where you're getting your info from.
Eloquence doesn't sound human but that's not what I mean.
I'm talking about voices like Microsoft hazel, yes you can tell it's a TTS voice but it's human enough for me if i ever need it.
Do these new voices breathe, that would be interesting, but from what i read they don't exclaimso eloquence still has them beat there. A lot of these newer voices don't use punctuation marks correctly.
Disapointed and a concern
I’m always up for more options for B/LV screen reader users. Sound preference is a very subjective personal thing and hence need for multiple options.
I agree these voices are like at least two generations antiquated. Certainly, I do not need any more non- human voices like these. For just one example of voices available today in some apps e.g. ChatGPT plus, Gemini etc., the voice mode voices just keep getting better every few months and the most recent ChatGPT plus voice mode voice is full with all kinds of inflection sounding more and more like an emotional real human voice. But all the big AI companies have such voices and are using them. The TTS voice sellers including JAWS/FS should determine and how to and then start offering those kinds of voices to us.
Personally, I have heard countless free TS SAP voices and did not quite like any of them. So, I did go 3rd party and found/purchased Ivona Joey and Ivona Sally. However, that was 10yrs ago so even those better than current TTS voices sound antiquated as mentioned above with the AI voice mode.
Here is my concern. I do not see any discussion and request/demand such current gen voices for our TTS screen readers? I see all kinds of useful topics and bug reports and reviews on Apple Vis and never about the low-quality outdated voices? I admit I myself am guilty of this.