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Comment by pasta | Hacker News Reader

As I remember this was done on an Apple computer.

In the command line you could do this with they 'say' command.

The parameter -v is used for the voice. And I think "Fitter Happier" is 'Fred'.

  say -v Fred "fitter.happier.more productive"

Edit: other sources say it was 'Bruce'. But I don't have an Apple, so I can't check.

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My go to favourite is 'Karen' for the Australian accent. Her voice is far more natural sounding that most of the others I've auditioned, and I use her as the default and pepper all my deployment scripts with 'say' commands now.

As a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly!

She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that's something ;-)

Hahaha yeah, I’m a kiwi living in Melbourne and at first before Apple had added New Zealand to Siri’s input localisation I had it set to Australian and it’d get everything wrong, I found that instead setting it to British English it worked a lot better and then better again when New Zealand was added, regardless I keep Siri’s voice set to British Female as it sounds the most natural to me.

For those that aren’t familiar with Australian vs New Zealand ascents - they’re /very/ different despite how close the countries are physically located to each other. When spoken New Zealand English has more of a British / South African - ‘rounder’ sound, where Australian is generally (especially as you move north or west up the country) more nasal and closer to American English with more emphasis on E rather than O if that makes sense.

You just answered a question I pondered earlier today as I watched the MacOS X demo I linked to above somewhere. And that is to the question if a native speaker would recognize the synthetic speech as unnatural. As the video progresses it lands on international languages such as Arabic and Chinese among other things. To my ear and my best memory of how those languages sound the synthetic versions came out pretty convincing. It made me think about a concept I've had about a test to language recognition: if a native speaker were to speak gibberish in their native tongue would an outsider to the language recognize it as gibberish or assume it was vocabulary in that language.

There's a short film on YouTube that explores that idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY

It's a very strange experience hearing it!

This is a video of Saara who is not a native speaker but who has an extraordinary ability to mimic accents.

https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw

Even today, of the 8 voices I have available in my Siri, Australian Female is still the most natural sounding. I guess that is the gender identity of the person who writes that bit of code. Or maybe Australians just sound naturally robotic...

My default is Fiona. It seems like the cadences of a Scottish accent help mask the shortcomings of TTS technology.

I'm going to lean towards Fred

Bruce https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=42

Fred https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=49

It's definitely Fred.

Another clever use was "Kathys Song" by Apoptygma Berzerk, which was named for the Mac "Kathy" speech synthesizer voice used to sing the chorus. Great song too.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oBYrZNZSbf4

that's cool background. I didn't mean to suggest it was actually the same voice Stephen Hawking utilizes, but just to put forth a popular and familiar sound to imagine with. Though Apple's Fred and Bruce may be the original characters, I'm not sure they'd be as well known as Stephen Hawking but I could be very wrong on that point. I'll try to dig up some Fred and Bruce tracks on YouTube.

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