How the iPod Nano 4G Speaks
9 September, 2008 @ 5:46 pm by LioncourtLioncourt.com just spent a few minutes speaking with Apple’s Mike Shebanek about the new accessibility features announced in Apple’s products today. We’ve learned a bit about how the iPod Nano 4G’s speaking menus work.
Understandably, a device as small and compact as the iPod Nano hardly has the processing power to generate text-to-speech (TTS) on the fly…at least, not speech that would be up to Apple’s standards. Instead, Apple has come up with a unique way to offer speech on the iPod Nano’s menus.
Enter iTunes 8.
iTunes 8 is now fully accessible for both visually impaired Mac and Windows users. When paired with an iPod Nano 4G, iTunes taps into your Mac or PC’s processing power to generate tiny audio files for the various menus, artists, album, song titles, in your library. When you sync, that information is sent to your iPod Nano 4G.
The software uses the system voice settings in either Mac or Windows. The great thing about this is you will be able to purchase third-party voices, such as the Infovox iVox family of voices offered by Assistiveware, and use them on your iPod Nano 4G, including voices for foreign languages. Of course, most people will be very happy with Alex, the built-in TTS voice included in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Any changes to rate, volume, etc of your system voice will be respected and reflected on your iPod Nano 4G.
While the majority of features on the iPod Nano 4G are working with speech, there are some exceptions. Some games will not work, and the clock is not currently implemented. Mr. Shebanek stressed the fact that Apple wanted to get these features out to the visually impaired community now. They will move forward to perfect the system and listen to user feedback.
BlindGeek wrote:
My only concern is that it assumes you’re going to synch with your iTunes library. If it tries to synch an iPod Nano with my iTunes library, there’ll be problems; I have over fifty gigs of stuff. The only things I regularly synch using iTunes are podcasts. Hopefully the files will be generated just from adding a file to your iPod. I’m sure there’s *some* workaround. I mean, many people have bigger iTunes libraries than their ipods can hold, right?
Bert Patterson responded:
I found the use of short audio files and syncing with an iPod to be of great interest. I did something somewhat similar to put a synthesized voice as a narrator on a iDVD slideshow project.
In Automator, there is a text-to-speech action that will generate audio files with the extension of ‘aiff’ from a text string. I have an Automator applet called ‘Text To Speech’. The applet will read a input text string to create an output audio file. Thus, a narration consisting of short audio files can be created.
Later, I opened GarageBand and moved the audio files onto a sound track intended for a iDVD slideshow. The timeline allows regular pausing between the short audio files.
The GarageBand track is then created and later imported into iDVD, where there is a ‘Fit To Audio’ option for iDVD slideshows. The audio files can be matched to images. I can verify this because I am partially sighted. For this iDVD slideshow project, both the audio files and images are 10 seconds apart, and the length of the Garageband track matches the length of the iDVD slideshow. Thus, synchronization is accomplished.
Kudos to Apple. On my part, it was much trial and error.
Lioncourt observed:
Re: BlindGeek
You never have to sync an entire library if you don’t want to. You can choose specific songs/albums/artists/podcasts/whatever to sync. This is true for all models of iPods and always has been as far as I know. It’s been that way for years, anyway.
tallin32 remarked:
I must say that this is a far better experience than, say, what’s available on the Zune. Sadly, whilst I’d *LIKE* to say what the Zune team’s response was when I suggested the idea of a TTS engine on their already CE-based kernel, I can’t, because I’m under NDA. I can say that it left me little hope for the future as far as Zune accessibility goes and probably get my point across though.
I don’t suppose anyone here knows what the iPod’s processing power is? A friend and I were discussing this on Twitter, and it seemed odd that Apple wouldn’t put a text to speech engine in the iPod OS, as speech engines exist reasonably happily in other embedded devices (of course, one could also argue that this is version 0.9 and a more dynamic permanent solution that would work with other apps could be coming).
I’m definitely pleased with Apple’s accessibility efforts though, particularly as pertains to this vis a vis a major competitor–which is saying something, because I work for said major competitor (although not in the Zune team). I’m still looking for accessible GUI devtools for Mac, then I’m sold–especially since Microsoft employees actually, if you can believe this, do get discounts on Apple products.