For any fans of retro speech synthesis, a legend has spoken at last - well at least a legend for me. In the early 00's, Wirtualna Polska, one of the leading web portals providing free-of-charge mailboxes, daily news, TV schedule and many things that made Internet attractive at that time, has released their own speech synthesizer dubbed, very creatively, Syntezator Mowy WP. The main goal of it was to read out messages and contact status changes in their instant messaging app, WP Kontakt, later Spik, pronounced like the English word "speak". It was an exe running in the system tray, waiting to be sent text. It wasn't compatible with any SAPI version and other than WP Kontakt, it was only ever used in various instant messaging software, mostly through third-party plugins. It's based off Festival but the voice base belonged to WP. Years have passed, the instant messaging scene in Poland, once ripe with local products, was taken over by the international solutions the likes of Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp and so Spik and the accompanying TTS ceased being developed further. The installers for both the male and female voices are hard to come by (the male one is still hosted by several general purpose websites with installers for all sorts of things but I still pulled it off one of the old copies of the original website that the Internet Archive has to offer). The link for the female voice is dead there and the only single lead I got by Googling the original installer's file name is a web folder of someone on a Polish file hosting website - sadly, this one's expired too, so unless someone's got a copy of it locally, it may very well be lost media. The original software can be installed but won't speak. Thanks to one friend tinkering a little, it started speaking through all sorts of modern things and the attached recording is the male voice reading huge numbers - it could actually go upto heptillions.
#RetroTech #Accessibility #Blind #TextToSpeech
Erkhyan
Lost in Ingermanland 🍄