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Listen to the Nuance Text-to-Speech Voices Found in Mac OS X Lion

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Apr 12, 2001
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Lion Speech control panel (via 9to5mac)​
Late last week, Netputing revealed that Mac OS X Lion Developer Previews include an option to install new text-to-speech voices. The voices were actually found to be identical to voices from a Nuance speech product, seemingly confirming that Apple will be using Nuance technology in Mac OS X Lion. The voices aren't quite yet usable in Lion, as Netputing notes that you currently get an error message in Lion when trying to install them. OSX Daily, however, points out that the voices are available online for sample:
- English American Accent – Samantha
- English British Accent – Serena
- French Canadian – Felix
- Spanish – Monica
- Finnish – Mikko (seen in screenshot)
- German – Yannick (seen in screenshot)
- Mandarin Chinese – Mei Linghttp://nextupdownloads.com/scansamples/Mei-Ling.wav
Click to expand...
The new voices are distinct improvements over the previous text-to-speech voices.

Rumors had pegged Apple's Nuance negotiations to be centered around iOS 5 rather than Mac OS X Lion, although there could be a broader agreement between the two companies. Apple's interest in Nuance seems primarily due to their speech recognition technology rather than text-to-speech functionality, as Siri had used Nuance to power their voice-activated search. Apple acquired Siri in April 2010 and is expected to integrate its technology into iOS.


Article Link: Listen to the Nuance Text-to-Speech Voices Found in Mac OS X Lion
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/16/listen-to-the-nuance-text-to-speech-voices-found-in-mac-os-x-lion/
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Still not very good. The British English speaker sounds pretty bad, and the US English speaker is just OK. IMHO, I find that the voices from AssistiveWare sound better (http://assistiveware.com/ivoxsamples.php), but it's not a cheap product!

Now, as someone that has been studying Mandarin for the past 4+ years (and still studying), I can definitely say that Mei Ling sounds *horrible*. That Chinese voice is the equivalent of just stringing together the character sounds. The connecting of characters and their spacing just sounds really bad. It just sounds incredibly choppy. Ugh!

:(

--DotComCTO
 
DotComCTO said:
Still not very good. The British English speaker sounds pretty bad, and the US English speaker is just OK. IMHO, I find that the voices from AssistiveWare sound better (http://assistiveware.com/ivoxsamples.php), but it's not a cheap product!
Click to expand...

The voices on the AssistiveWare site don't sound significantly better than the Nuance ones, although I find most of them to be listenable, much more than anything found on the Mac currently or in the past.
 
The English ones were pretty good. The German one was awful, tho--super computery. Voices are getting better and better, though, thank goodness. Another decade and they will probably be quite close to human.
 
I'd like a voice that sounds like HAL from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Maybe a good C3PO and Enterprise computer voice (Majel Barrett).

Perhaps they should make a system for just adding your own voices. With sample texts to read for generating all sounds in a given language. Then people good at impersonating these voices can post them online.

Just like I have a good Yoda and decent Darth Vader for my Tom Tom. Before the official voices were released. Though I realize these are not as thorough as all sounds of a language.

I'm sure many enthusiast would create good voices.

What I wonder is when performing text to speech. Does the software just look at the word and try to pronounce it? Or does it have a dictionary to work off the phonemic representations of the words instead for all 200,000+ English words, while guessing on misspelled words and proper nouns.
 
Apple Chinese Dictation Kit

Once upon a time (1996), Apple produced a "Chinese Dictation Kit" and it won an award.

This kit required the end-user to sit-down and train the software their particular voice. Afterward, the end-user would end-up with a voice profile. This voice profile would travel with the user. For example, the user trains in a school classroom to have a voice profile. Then, the user would carry their voice profile with them (on a floppy disk). At home, they would then be able to talk to their Mac for text-to-speech. They could also do this on any Mac equipped with the ability for text-to-speech.

Get this -- the Chinese does not have an alphabet, so they are not easily able to type an email, write a paper, etc. This is why the Chinese Dictation Kit was so cool -- and we're talking about 1996!

Press Release: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Apple%27s+Chinese+Dictation+Kit+Wins+Coveted+National+Technology+Award...-a018648529

This was the "old" Apple. A company that introduced revolutionary 1.0 products, ... then did very little to continue developing their products. So, with the "new" Apple a similar product will be introduced and developed. This product will also be integrated into all apps.

When it comes to personal computers, the method of input has always been groundbreaking in allowing more people to use the computer as well as opening the doors to more innovation.

For example...

1. Punch Cards
2. Keyboard
3. Mouse
4. iPod wheel
5. Touch
6. Text-to-speech
 
For cheap, consumer-level voice synthesist, I like NeoSpeech voices: demo

For imitating drunken karaoke singers, I like Vocaloid's Sweet Ann: demo and of course "Tony" is always a hoot: demo
 
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Felix, the Quebecer is quite good. Thanks Apple, finally you recognize us not as french from France!!!
 
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