Text to Speech voices - the realistic ones

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puki

Everybody knows about Microsoft "Sam", "Mike" and "Mary", etc. Yet there are some very realistic Text To Speech engines out there.

I just installed the Microsoft Text-to-Speech Engines for SAPI5:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/speechSDK/SDK/5.1/WXP/EN-US/speechsdk51.exe

This comes with a sample TTS voice - however, there is no info about it - it is chuffingly realistic.

I note from a quick Google about that you can download these voices for around $30 USD / £15.00 UK:
http://www.nextup.com/TextAloud/SpeechEngine/voices.html

Some of the voices you can listen to on that page are amazing.

Anyone know much about TTS voices - any really great ones to go for (each for circa the price of a computer game)?