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Voice Avatars

It is easy to create a voice avatar and have “him” do the talking for you.

Here is a simple way to have a phone call with somebody but use a computer synthesized voice instead of your own voice.

  1. I recently lost my voice but I needed to do some phone calls and conference calls.

  2. So I bought a voice for OS X called David from Cepstral for $30. David sounds much better than the free voices that come with OS X.

  3. Then I used Speakerfone which tells David to speak whatever I type into Speakerfone.

  4. Then I jacked the output of Speakerfone into Soundflower which lets you route the audio output of any application to the audio input of any application. I told Soundflower to route the output of Speakerfone into Skype.

  5. Then I called normal phones with SkypeOut and used David to do the talking for me! You can actually have interactive conversations like this.

  6. A final touch: Use Soundflowerbed to listen to what David is saying on your behalf.

The audio flows like this:

Speakerfone → David → Soundflower → Skype

Total cost: $30. Or $0 if you use the OS X built-in voices.

Total time: 5 minutes of setup if you follow my instructions above.

Free bonus: When you call people with skype, the caller ID shows up as something like 000123456!

This is a fairly clear example of why I am a badass and why everybody wants to be my friend.

Related: DittyBot did something similar that lets you listen to your iTunes library through your cell phone.

Categories: Technology, VoIP.