Whats the best Text to Speech (TTS) Engine?

I’m making an IVR menu. I bought Crystal from ATT Natural Voices. I’ve listened to Callie, Cepestral Swift. Currently I’m trying out Kate from Neospeech VoiceText 2.0 (maybe 3.0, whatevers out currently).
neospeech.com/demo/demo_text.php

None of them sound good. I’ll call up my IVR and the audio quality is good, but the voice messes up too often and isn’t as clear as if I called up Sprint, or some other big companies IVR system.

I thought ATT would have the best TTS Engine, but Crystal sucks at speaking the english language and she has no personnality.

Anyone have any ideas?

Use Allison thevoice.digium.com

Mike is a much better voice within ATT

Cool, Allison seems like a cool idea. I wonder how I can obtain credits…

I need a good TTS to read emails though so the voice will say diffferent things per call. And if your listening to your email over the phone you want to be able to understand it.

Buy credits at digium.com

I used Allison a few times now, and the turn around time is very fast!! The prompts I had done were completed within 24 hours, and they are excellent. When you first purchase credits from digium.com, it takes a while to show up on your thevoice.digium.com account so you can submit your prompts.

But anyway, I am looking for a better TTS solution too. I’m currently using festival, but I am very disappointed in the sound quality. I have been using it to generate dynamic content for a custom application.

If any does have any recommendations for a high quality speech engine that runs on Linux, and interfaces nicely with Asterisk, I sure would be interested too!!

Cepestral, ATT, and NeoSpeech all work nicely with Asterisk, or an AGI script, but sound quality is not where I want it to be