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

German is my mother tongue and I thought the German voice was really good except for some computery humps and bumps.
 
I think that especially the german one is pretty good. They need to adapt the pronunciation some words like "Euro" but then it would be almost perfect. I think it is remarkable that it doesn't sound so robotic like the american one does.

Eso said:
Man, those voices are terrible. The guys at Neospeech put them to shame.
Click to expand...

Neospeech does a good job of pronouncing the standard text, but when you enter a custom text in that demo field it becomes horrible.
 
Speech to Text

I have a question that I have been trying to figure out for awhile. Can anyone recommend a speech-to-text program? Do they even exist? Is that something that natively exist in system preferences for free? For example Google "transcribes" by voice mails to text but I would love to be able to do the reverse (for more then 30 seconds).

I guess what I am looking for is a computer version of an old fashion Dictaphone and secretary.

Thanks in advance.

Joe
 
The french one is amazing. I think that with some polishing these voices can become indistinguishable from human voices in a few years. Alex is also great in Snow Leopard though, I think it's on par with these ones.
 
The french canadian accent actually sounds pretty darn good I must say, and this for all french canadians across Canada! I want to hear the girl one.
 
jpg said:
Neospeech does a good job of pronouncing the standard text, but when you enter a custom text in that demo field it becomes horrible.
Click to expand...

Put this in the demo: "An orbiting spacecraft has sent back new evidence for the presence of water on Mars."

Now compare "Samantha" from the OP to any of the voices in the demo.

It's no contest.
 
joelitz said:
I have a question that I have been trying to figure out for awhile. Can anyone recommend a speech-to-text program? Do they even exist? Is that something that natively exist in system preferences for free? For example Google "transcribes" by voice mails to text but I would love to be able to do the reverse (for more then 30 seconds).

I guess what I am looking for is a computer version of an old fashion Dictaphone and secretary.

Thanks in advance.

Joe
Click to expand...

Well it isn't free however Nuance makes speech software for the Mac called Dictate. They bought MacSpeech and are currently working on a new version of speech software for the Mac to get it up to the Windows version.
http://www.nuance.com/for-individuals/by-product/dragon-for-mac/index.htm
 
Meh...

These kinda suck. I've heard better. i.e. the voices that jawbone uses in their headsets.
 
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niclet said:
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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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I'm also very satisfied with this voice :)
 
Speech to Text

MCIowaRulz said:
Well it isn't free however Nuance makes speech software for the Mac called Dictate. They bought MacSpeech and are currently working on a new version of speech software for the Mac to get it up to the Windows version.
http://www.nuance.com/for-individuals/by-product/dragon-for-mac/index.htm
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. Any personal experience with either? Should I wait till they combine and the new version comes out?

Thanks for the tips and sorry OP for the side thread talk.
 
The existing Alex voice in Leopard is better than these new voices.

EDIT: I just listened to Alex again to double check, and now I'm not so sure if Alex is better or worse. In either case, neither Alex nor the new voices are good enough to for me to imagine myself using them.
 
Samanth? That's the name of the current voice of the US English iPhone voice control thing. Could they be the same?
 
Hmmmm...still not where I would want the technology to be. I know it's complicated, but it seems like it should be a little better by this point.

My favorite of all of the ones listed so far, and the one that I think sounds closest to an English speaking human is Rachel from the assistiveware site.

http://assistiveware.com/ivoxsamples.php?voice=Rachel_iVox_HQ

I could live with that one. Unfortunately I have yet to hear anything as good from Nuance, but that could change. (crossing fingers) :)
 
niclet said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; fr-fr) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8J2)

Felix, the Quebecer is quite good. Thanks Apple, finally you recognize us not as french from France!!!
Click to expand...

Vivre le Quebec Libre! :p

By the way, the Spanish accent was awful. A Latin-American accent would sound better. :cool:
 
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