Text To Speech

One of the cool things about the Mac OS is that it has come with text-to-speech technology built right into the operating system, since System 7 in 1993.

The problem is, it hasn't changed a bit since then. The voices sound exactly the same now as they used to sound coming out of an LC III in my old high school.

There are a few companies that make some AMAZING sounding speech synthesis systems, like AT&T and Neospeech. On Windows, there are a lot of programs that default to using the Microsoft speech agent, but you can buy plugin packs from these companies to enhance the voices.

Any ideas if Apple ever plans to pursue this? I would LOVE to be able to plug Neospeech into my Mac, or any equivalent "next-generation" speech synthesis package.

Because, c'mon Apple, things have progressed in the past 12 years.

 

Cool. I didn't notice them. Still, those relate to operating system code (integrating it with the OS) and a mapping between a dictionary and the phonemes... I'd still like to see a new speech engine based (like AT&T and Neospeech) on real samples, for example. The downside is that these technologies require a lot of processing power and 500-600 megs of hard drive space for the sample database. Still, there should at least be some kind of option to download an advanced speech pack.

Here's hoping. In the meantime, my household caller-ID-annnounce system is going back to a Windows machine, where I can use Neospeech in a $30 add-on pack to the application I'm using (Homeseer).