Voice emulating software

Archived from groups: rec.audio.tech (More info?)

simondex@yahoo.com wrote:
> Is there any voice emulating program on the market? I mean speech
> emulator with male/female voices?

What do you mean by "emulating"?

There are text-to-speech voice synthesizers, some of which are starting
to become respectable -- not human-sounding yet, but they're getting
prosody right and are far more understandable than they used to be. Few
of these can be programmed to "sing", but I believe one or two can be --
not easily, though.

There are vocal synthesizers that reproduce the sound of a human voice.
Some of these are doing quite sophisticated modelling to try to sound
like real human performers. Problem is, the ones I'm aware of can't
handle words/lyrics -- their limit is vocalese (voice as instrument)

Then are there are various devices intended to take a voice track as
input, decompose it, and recompose it as an altered voice. Simple
pitch-shifting's easy. Believably changing gender isn't.