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

Mesmerized by SciFi Fantasy

A unique phenomenon with science fiction stories, movies, and TV shows is that they push out idealized concepts decades (and in some cases centuries) before technology can possibly implement them. Any attempts along the way are invariably and impatiently compared to the original idealized concepts and usually found lacking. Such is the case with the Sonny and V.I.K.I in I, Robot, HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Computers in Star Treks, and so many other, all of which have "human" personalities. The comments so far seem to be from exceedingly impatient observers. They seem so enthralled by their sci-fi ideals that they can't appreciate the profound achievements so far. I'm actually quite impressed with these samples and how much better and more natural they sound reading text compared to earlier attempts. I'm completely amazed that the vocal designers were able to achieve not only a distinctly woman's voice but one with a British accent. How the **** did they do that!? And that German voice: it has the true native German inflection perfectly nuanced and that is so difficult for an American to learn to sound like. The Chinese voice sounded extremely convincing. We have definitely come a long way toward the natural human voice ideal, and with progress this amazing at this stage, it is just a matter of short time before we'll not be able to tell when a computer is the one giving us our orders.
 
MattInOz said:
Apart from to long a space between sentences I thought the British was good copy of the BBC voice more than common british.
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Actually I thought the British voice wasn't bad at all. I actually speak in tones fairly similar to so called BBC English. There is no such thing as "common British", but there is received pronounciation, which frankly, is the clearest English there is.
 
Eso said:
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.
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True. But I'm not sure that's a fault of the speech software so much as picking a really terrible, stilted voice to play Samantha.

The British accent sounds fairly good.
 
Monica (Spanish) is from Spain.It doesn't bother me listen to her 5 minutes, but more time.... I'm not comfortable.

Should be a more neutral accent Latin American (Mexico-Colombia-Perú)
 
umm, is it just me who thinks that text to speak is for the most part just a gimmick that’s been floating for ~15-20 y in Mac OS's?

I'd rather they spent their money and energy in improving core functions of the OS; speed, reliability and security rather than some function that you likely try out once or twice for fun when you install new OS.
 
RichardI said:
So where is the english CANADIAN ?? Does apple know that 95% of all Canadians are not francophones?
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Why would they do a english Canadian? Isn't it equivalent to english US??

And by the way, 6.5M french Canadian / 33M Canadian = 20%.... We are far from 5%....
 
DotComCTO said:
Still not very good. The British English speaker sounds pretty bad, and the US English speaker is just OK.
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I guess it's subjective then. I actually found the British female voice more natural, and certainly more tolerable, than the American one.

IMHO, I find that the voices from AssistiveWare sound better (http://assistiveware.com/ivoxsamples.php), but it's not a cheap product!
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Well there I agree. Those voices sound maybe 20% better to my ears. (Edit: I just listened to some more voices, and it varies. 20% was probably too generous.)

We use an iPhone app called MetroView Australia, and the female voice on that really blows most of these away. Perhaps the technology is not true text-to-speech? I don't know. But it sounds great. Perhaps the accent has something to do with that. ;)
 
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wackymacky said:
umm, is it just me who thinks that text to speak is for the most part just a gimmick…
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Yeah but just wait until the AI catches up and you can buy your own astromech and protocol droids from the local Jawas. What adventures you might have then!
 
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