Have you heard Mike? Could be. Mike is a professional reader, and he's everywhere these days. On MapQuest, the Web-based map service, he'll read aloud whatever directions you ask for. If you like to have AOL or Yahoo! e-mail read aloud to you over the phone, that's Mike's voice you're hearing. Soon Mike may do voice-overs on TV, reading National Weather Service forecasts. But don't expect to see Mike's face on the screen: He's not human. He's a computer voice cobbled together from prerecorded sounds—arguably the most human-sounding one yet.
Introduced in 2001 by AT&T Labs, Mike is fast becoming a star voice of text-to-speech technology, which converts written words into spoken language. He is part of AT&T's large, multilingual, and ever-growing family of so-called Natural Voices. His cohorts include Reiner and Klara (who speak German); Rosa (Spanish); Alain (French); and Audrey and Charles (British English). An American-English speaker named Crystal provided the voice of the spaceship in the recent movie Red Planet. Mike, Crystal, Reiner, Rosa: They're all talk, no bodies.
