Cepstral Voices releases (finally!) OS X 10.6 compatible voices!

[ben schmidt]

Any folks using the Cepstral Voices for OS X?

Cepstral is a provider of high quality text-to-speech voices, in both genders, and in a variety of languages and accents. They are similar in quality to the default OS X 'Alex' voice -- which is a step above the other OS X voice choices in the 'Speech' Preference Pane.

Unfortunately all licensed Cepstral Voice users, including me :( ,  lost the functionality of any Cepstral Voices they had licensed, when they upgraded to OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard. 

I've been checking in regularly, and today I've very happy to report that Cepstral has released a beta with OS X 10.6 compatibility!

I downloaded the 5.2beta 'Callie' voice. My v5 Callie license was accepted, and Callie is now the default System Voice on my OS X 10.6.2 MacBook Pro, and 'Alex' has been sent to the benches.

[Dan Millar]

Alex is pretty good, and I was happy with Victoria before he came along. I still get the occasional weird pronunciation, but it's amazing how good the speech parser is getting with abbreviations, currencies, etc. If you have Developer Tools installed, there's a neat couple of Apps in there for playing with the speech capabilities - Repeat After Me, which let's you use your voice or code to "tune" up the text-to-speech conversion. Alex is so good, I often have him read web articles out loud while I do real work in another app, but I did prefer the female voice of Victoria....

I produced some e-books last year that had to be accessible to sight-impaired people, and had to work on Windows or Mac computers. No problem on the Mac, but I could not get Windows to pronounce "paraplegic" properly (say that fast three times!). In the end I had to mis-spell it in the document, phonetically, then paste an image of the correct word over top of the fakey word.

When Apple introduced the new OS with VoiceOver (was that 10.4?), I guess I wasn't paying enough attention. One dark evening after everyone had left, I was upgrading all the machines in the office, running from one to the other with the disks, and trying to do them all in sequence. While I was waiting for the first installs to complete, I decided to tidy up some cabling under the desks. I was deeply engrossed in untangling some mischievous USB cables when I was so startled by a male voice in the room, I hit my head trying to stand up - a bad idea when underneath any kind of furniture. It was VoiceOver asking me to input something or other in the setup routine. I guess I gave myself a real heads-up on that feature, pun intended.

Fun Mac Prank: Set the voice to "Fred", call up one of your buddies and have your Mac say into the phone " Hi Fred, Stephen Hawking here, wondering if you could help me with a problem?".

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

[ben schmidt]

Another of the many ways one can invoke the Mac's built-in text-to-speech, is by opening a terminal window (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and typing:

say "arbitrary text string"

Typing the following will give you additional options from the 'say' command's manpages:

man say