Hi Tim, On Sep 14, 2007, at 8:10 PM, Tim Grady wrote:
OK, I have some questions. First, if you already own the Ivox voices can you just purchase ghostreader? Second, if you can is there anything special you would have to do to set it up?
Esther already provided a lot of background in er reply, so let me just follow-up on only a few things.
GhostReader (39.95 euro or USD) is always sold with ConvenienceWare voices (basically a slightly compressed version of the same voices Infovox iVox uses that however will only work with GhostReader). You cannot buy GhostReader without voices. If we sold it also without, we would have to pay far higher licensing fees to Acapela Group, which develops the voices. By including them in every single copy we sell we got good prices and could keep this product affordable. GhostReader works fine with Infovox iVox voices, with Apple voices and any other third party voices. You can also purchase GhostReader bundled with the system-wide Infovox iVox voices
VisioVoice (249 euro or USD) is always sold with Infovox iVox voices. Again, to allow us to keep a reasonable price.
If you already own the Infovox iVox voices and want to purchase VisioVoice you will have to pay the full price (as we are not allowed to sell it without voices) and could for example pick another language for the included Infovox iVox voices so that you have say US English (for your original iVox) and UK English for the one coming with VisioVoice.
If you already own Infovox iVox and want to purchase GhostReader you would normally have to pay the full price unless you recently purchased iVox in which case we may be able to give you a small discount on your GhostReader purchase. Contact us by email in that case with your Infovox iVox activation code and explain the situation and we will see if we can help you.
So what are the differences between VisioVoice and GhostReader? GhostReader is a document and selection reader for the general consumer and education markets with a mouse centered user interface and audio export features. VisioVoice has similar features but is more keyboard driven and has additional features for vision impaired users such as a text enlarger, image enlarger, talking interface and a much greater compatibility with VoiceOver. We are currently putting the finishing touches on version 1.1 which will have improved VoiceOver compatibility and also add support for hearing what you type. In terms of the document and selection reader functions GhostReader is currently slightly ahead of VisioVoice with functions to go back to the start of a sentence or skip to the next paragraph or sentence. These will probably added to VisioVoice 1.2 in the future. Basically, these two applications will be feature hopping a bit with regard to their reader functionality with sometimes a new feature appearing in one first and sometimes in the other first.
As a rule of thumb: If you do not have a vision impairment get GhostReader or the GhostReader plus Infovox iVox bundle. If you do have a vision impairment get VisioVoice (which includes Infovox iVox). VoiceOver users, who do not need the text and image enlarger of VisioVoice will still benefit from a more keyboard driven interface and from better VoiceOver compatibility. For example in the upcoming version 1.1 of VisioVoice speech with an iVox voice from VisioVoice will no longer get interrupted by VoiceOver speech. This means you can continue to use your computer and work with VoiceOver while VisioVoice may be reading a document to you, assuming of course that you picked different voices for both and can sufficiently distinguish between the speech of the document being read and the speech of VoiceOver. for technical reasons we cannot provide this level of compatibility with GhostReader.
I hope this clarifies things a bit, cheers, david.
