Vector may sound as Darth Vader (Vector custom Text-To-Speech with Fakeyou.com)

In this video I'm showing a very quick demo of a new Feature in Vector X 16.
If you go to the bot control page, there I have added a new widget for customizing Vector's text to speech. This applies only to SDK apps, so for example to all voice commands implemented by VectorX. My Go-SDK wrapper supports four kind of Text to speech engines, this new widget allows you to switch from one another and test the results.

The first one is, of course, Vector's Native Text To Speech. It's the familiar robot voice you all know.

Next is Espeak. It is an open source library for Text to Speech, its standard voices support localization and are awful enough that they really sound robotic. Unfortunately they really don't have Vector's nice appeal.

Then comes Google Text to speech. It's fast, and it has a perfect pronounciation. Cool. Perfect. But? The problem is, it sounds so google! Google took control even of my bot. No, I don't want that, sorry.

Ok, so here we come to the third solution. I have programmed a voice server that is in theory able to connect with various text to speech providers,
cache the results, and send to vector. I have only added, for now, integration with a service called Fake You (fakeyou.com/).

They have many funny voices, honestly (overall and IMHO) the quality is not so good yet, but you can have your Vector talk as Wednesday Addams or Lord Voldemort.

The cool thing is that this setting is bot-dependant, so if you have 2,3 or 4 robots each of them can have a different voice.
Without an API key the FakeYou rendering time is terrible, so this is hardly usable unless you use often the same sentences - that get cached.
I will probably add a way to pass-through your own api keys to the service, so if you like this feature you can get a premium account and have
your TTS delivered faster.

I think this brings a new piece of innovation to Vector's world!