Meet SS Citadel announcer voice, WillowTalk

[66ee833190770WhyNott]

I don't know if someone has found out about this, but all SS announcer voice files were generated using an old voice synthesizer software called WillowTalk.

Demonstration:
Image: http://webmup.com/792b3/vid.webm

you can download a free trial of WillowTalk here:

http://www.idg.pl/ftp/willowtalk.html

[66ee8331908c1Acantophis3rD]

That's so cool! In my stream today we noticed how "depressed" the announcer voice seem to sound under the control of shodan. haha

[66ee833190bfaRocketMan]

You know how long I've been looking for this?  You are a godsend!

[66ee833190d77ZylonBane]

"Announcer"? You people have been playing too much DOTA.

[66ee833190e88RocketMan]

BTW, the file won't install.  I think my anti-virus is blocking it.  Is there a clean copy of this for download err.....

[66ee833190fefJosiahJack]

This is cool.  I couldn't get it to work either.  Said it could not run SETUP.EXE.  Tried the usual compatibility malarky but no luck.

[66ee8331910f7ZylonBane]

Used 7Zip to open the self-extractor and manually extracted the install files. Tried to run SETUP.EXE, failed. The installer is apparently 16-bit, which is no longer supported under 64-bit Windows versions.

Could be the only way to install and/or run this is in a virtual machine running an older version of Windows.

[66ee8331911f8JosiahJack]

Ya I tried that by running windows 3 in DosBox   

Still no cookies.

But Solitaire works so hooray!

[66ee833191459Marvin]

The website says it works on XP, so anyone with an XP machine or Win7 Professional (or higher) should be able to install it.

[66ee83319154aSpAM_CAN]

Awesome! I spent ages trying to figure out which speech synth they used - ended up using some Win 3.1 DECTalk monstrosity with pictures of faces. It was similar, but not quite right.

[66ee8331917b4JosiahJack]

The website says it works on XP, so anyone with an XP machine or Win7 Professional (or higher) should be able to install it.

The self extractor is 32bit so yes, but the SETUP.EXE it extracts is not, it is 16bit which does not run on a 64bit, hence why the website says it only goes as high as  standard XP [32bit].

[66ee8331918c8JosiahJack]

I think the reason it failed on my emulator of Windows 3 is that Win3 is 16bit only, while the _ISDEL.EXE appears to be 32bit. It seems that I need to emulate a 32bit OS that is capable of running 16bit.

[66ee833191a56Marvin]

As I said: If you have Windows 7 Professional or better, you can download Windows Virtual PC and then Windows XP Mode for it for free, either as 32-bit (which you would want here) or 64-bit.


Anyway, if they really used it, they must have either had different voices or they did post-processing on them. Maybe they had the full version and the trial only offers a small assortment?
This was done with the Paul voice:
http://vocaroo.com/i/s0DcNGLcVNbq

And this with the Harry voice:
http://vocaroo.com/i/s1BZ5o4ZyYef


All other voices do not match the Citadel one at all. You can change the text speed, but that's basically it.

[66ee833191be6Gawain]

It seems WillowTalk was released at 1997 according to their website.

Also the sample from first post is close at the beginning but way off in the end. Maybe WillowTalk was made using same algorithm for speech synthesis as the program LGS used. It is also possible LGS made it themselves.

[66ee833191f0bZylonBane]

As I said: If you have Windows 7 Professional or better, you can download Windows Virtual PC and then Windows XP Mode for it for free, either as 32-bit (which you would want here) or 64-bit.

You didn't say that before.

[66ee833192019RocketMan]

I always have xp32 installed so no trouble for me.  I just got unlucky trying it on 7 first.  Old obsolete software to the rescue

[66ee83319225eMarvin]

You didn't say that before.

Yes, I did.

[66ee83319242aZylonBane]

Yes, I did.

No, you didn't.

[66ee83319254dGawain]

I bet they used DECtalk. Different versions of software based DECtalk can be found here.

[66ee833192712Marvin]

No, you didn't.

Yes, I did.

[66ee8331928dfZylonBane]

Yes, I did.

Really. Then point out the actual supposed post where you first mentioned Virtual PC.

[66ee833192a35RocketMan]

Holy shit guys.  Life is too short to be comparing dick length with a set of calipers don't you think?

[66ee833192d3dMarvin]

Really. Then point out the actual supposed post where you first mentioned Virtual PC.

It's post #8. You can install WinXP on any virtual machine that your operating system supports, but only Win7 Professional or higher tiers come with Virtual PC + WinXPMode for free. so I couldn't have referenced any other solution. Granted, I did assume this would be common knowledge but then again, this is a forum full of very smart people.

[66ee833192ea1WhyNott]

so uhm, sorry for the inaccurate info. I had not actually made any background checks on this, I just stumbled across this voice synthesis software accidentally and the voiced sounded so uncannily like system shock announcer that I was convinced it could not had been a coincidence. I'm sorry if I mislead any of you, I literally thought that was the software they used...