Hello to you all

Its proberbly best I start from the beginning. Im a PC engineer and I have been learning VB.NET for the past 2 years. (Self Taught). I made a chatbot 6 months ago that uses AIML files. Ive recently gone back to this project and as Ive been reading and learning more about Ai and chatbots I have found it very interesting, so I have decided to take up where I left off and work on improving my my chatbot and my knowledge.

A few days ago I started looking into moving away from the Microsoft speech SAPI as it is awful and integrate a different voice into my program. I only spent about an hour looking into it and thought I had a good idea on how to do this. Today Ive started looking into it in depth and Ive just become more and more confused as the day has gone on. Could anyone point me in the direction of an open source synthesized voice that I can add into my application. Any suggestions and advice would be very much appreciated. Think I just need pointing back in the right direction

Sorry this post goes on a bit but I thought it better I explain exactly where I am at

Many Thanks

If you’re already a Microsoft developer, I would recommend you use the WebChat project on GitHub and integrate it with Microsoft Cognitive Services for speech recognition. It’s actually very straight forward—you can download the WebChat Visual Studio solution, get a Bing Speech API key, add the key into the web.config file for your WebChat solution and, wham, you integrate speech recognition into a bot!

WebChat project on GitHub: https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-WebChat
Microsoft Cognitive Services Bing Speech API: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/try/cognitive-services/?api=speech-api

Hello David:

Any luck trying Bing Speech API as I recommended above? Please let me know.