When Starting Out:
While doing the recordings the four things that will lead to the best quality for your synthetic voice are:
- Consistency
- Consistency
- Consistency
- Audio recording quality
To elaborate, your speech should be consistent in vocal effort (loudness), in speech rate, and voice quality. For voice quality, think of the difference in the way your voice sounds when you are relaxed and speaking softly versus when you are tense or angry, or happy and excited. You might not be speaking any louder, but your speech may have a different quality; your pitch might be a bit higher and your voice less breathy when excited. Synthetic voices tend to come out sounding better when the speaker sounds relaxed and not tense, but even more importantly, try to use exactly the same voice quality throughout the recording process. Other things where consistency helps are with regard to (a) microphone position, (b) time of day when you record, (c) things you’ve been eating or drinking just before recording.
After Finishing Your Voice:
Unless there were serious problems with some of the recordings you made, probably the best way to improve the quality of an existing synthetic voice is to add additional speech to it. If you would like to do this, please let us know and we can give you some instructions on adding new speech to an existing inventory, then rebuilding your voice.