Hi Greg,
Wow you were quick in replying.
You said that if I'm using the OS in Finnish the FInnish speech will work.
The trouble here is that as I said in my initial mail, I'd actually like to
use the OS and apps in US English. However, I still do need Finnish
occcasionally such as on some Web pages and in e-mail.
Ideally I'd like to use Voice Over in English, as well. My current WIndows
reader let's me use the screen reader and its control descriptions in
English while lettting me switch the language in which the screen text is
spoken between US English and Finnish when needed. BAsed on your description
it sounds like this would be possible within Voice Over, right?
You are right in speculating that US English spoken with a Finnish accent
doesn't sound good at all. However, as Finnish is spoken roughly the same
way you write it, US English is actually very intelligible that way,
probably more so than it is pronounced in Swedish and other languages. it
still doesn't mean I'd like to listen to the majority of the text in US
English with Finnish pronounciation, though.
So it would seem to me that with the Finnish voices that the language
problem is out of the way at least mostly. I'll have to wait for Leopard to
come out to get Braille anyway and if Logic will some day work with Voice
Over, that would be a good time to switch then.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
Greg Kearney wrote:
Hello;
I'll address the issue of Finnish speech as I have been dealing with
a similar issue with Swedish of late. Here is what I have found out.
If you are using the MacOS in Finnish and you have a Finnish voice
installed it will read the Finnish parts of the OS just fine. What is
rather odd is that there are some parts of VoiceOver which are only
in English at this point and those controls will be read in what I
can only describe as a very Finnish, or in my case Swedish, accent.
I haven't tried this with a Finnish voice and I don't know how it
would sound. I would be concerned that where as Swedish is a germanic
language and has many similarities with English such is not the case
with Finnish and how the Finnish voice would pronounce the English
interface might be very different.
It is possible to do a localization of the VoiceOver Utility into
Finnish. I could provide you the strings file to do this and then
build and installer that would insert the new localized items into
the VoiceOver Utility program. I've done this with Swedish and it
seems to work. You can set various parts of vocie over to speak in
various voices so for example the content could be in finnish while
other items would be read in an english voice. I could work on a
quick language/voice switcher for VoiceOver. That sounds like a good
idea.
<snip>
Finnish voices for the Mac can be obtained from AssistiveWare http://
www.assistiveware.com/index.php
On Feb 14, 2007, at 09:29 , Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
<snip>
1. I'm using Finnish speech on the Web and for e-mail on a daily
basis so I need a Finnish speech synthesizer for OS X. The
alternative is to surf or read mail in Windows which is kinda lame.
Are there any Finnish speech synths for OS X and how expensive are
they? Also, Voice Over would need to switch the language in which
on-screen text is being read. Is that already possible via a hotkey
or will it be in Leopard? I don't mind the apps and screen reader
prompts being in English as I've always computed in English.
I do know there's a multi-lingual Linux synth called eSpeak which
can probably be compiled to OS X as well. HOwever, I or someone
else would have to write a wrapper to be able to use that via what-
ever speech API the OS and Voice Over are using which is no easy
feat. Going even more hacker, one possibility would be to run my
current SAPi 4 based Windows speech synth in a virtual machine and
then drive it via Windows and Mac wrappers plus a named pipe to the
virtual machine. VmWare server, for instance, includes the ability
to read or write a guest machine parallel or serial port as a named
pipe.
But the trouble with both of these solutions is that they would
require extra work and wouldn't thus be available out of the box
and might not even be feasible. I'd like to rest assured if that if
I'm going to get a new Mac , it will speak my mother tongue as well.
