‘Text-to-Speech’ Archives

Today, Apple released the fifth major update to its Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system for Macintosh computers. 10.5.5 offers a wide array of fixes, as well as improvements to stability, reliability, security, and much more. A note in the knowledge base article about 10.5.5 notes that the update "IMproves speech dictionary." This may [...]

Lioncourt.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 [...]

Today, Assistiveware released their first product under the Convenienceware banner, version 1.5 of their popular GhostReader. GhostReader converts text to speech, both in real-time or sending the output to iTunes/iPod/iPhone compatible formats for easy playback on the go. It works with a variety of document formats, and can speak selected text in any application. It [...]

Today, Assistiveware released Infovox iVox version 1.2. Version 1.2 is a free upgrade for existing users that adds a pronunciation editor that allows users to add abbreviations or change the pronunciation of words. It also introduces a number of new voices and languages: Eliska and Sabrine for Czech, Ania for Polish, Snorri for Icelandic, Sanna [...]

Loquendo is now offering their high-quality text-to-speech voices to Mac developers for use in their software products. These voices do not currently integrate with the Mac’s speech services, as far as we can determine, so they are not yet suitable for use with VoiceOver. Given the multitude of languages and the quality of the voices, [...]