Hi Nic and Others, Well, to be fair it's been about three years since I tried the Cereproc voices and had to uninstall them. I bought the Heather voice near the end of 2009, according to the record of my receipts, and kept it on my system through early 2010. Then, I recall that the subject of Cereproc's voices came up again on list in 2011, and at that time Dónal said that they'd done a recent evaluation of several voices, including the Cereproc voices, for a research project. They'd found the Cereproc voices too laggy for their purposes, and ended up going with the Assistiveware voices instead.
The other uniquely odd thing I remember about using the Cereproc voices is that when I tried to experiment with using them for text-to-speech only, because of the VoiceOver crashes, I got a weird side-effect when trying the "say" command in Terminal. When I experimented with trying out the plain old vanilla "say" command without speech options to control rate, or used embedded commands, the Terminal window filled up with huge numbers of lines of non-printing characters. I've never had that happen with any voice before or after. I assume this no longer happens, I hope. That was one of the reasons, apart from the VoiceOver crashes, and having my Mac freeze even when I wasn't actively using the Cereproc voice, that finally led me to uninstall the voice. At the time I was also trying out a new assistive technology package called ClaroRead, that happened to be using the Cereproc voices. That kept crashing, too, and I couldn't figure out whether it was the Cereproc voices they were using or the program itself that was unstable, since there was only a limited time trial period. TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) does a series of developer interviews and profiles during the MacWorld events in May/June. I remember listening to one of these interviews with David Niemeijer of Assistiveware. He said that they do additional work with Apple to make sure that the Infovox voices are compatible with assistive technology products on the Mac, and I suspect this is why these voices are so robust with VoiceOver. David Niemeijer got into the assistive tech business when a friend of his was injured, and he ended up starting to write software that would help him. I guess there's a real commitment to testing and making sure that things work when there's a personal involvement, and you know that people are depending on you. In any case, to address Nic's point, Assistiveware does a lot of work on the Infovox/iVox voices to make sure that they work well with Mac OS X releases. HTH. Cheers, Esther On May 5, 2013, at 12:31 AM, Nicolai Svendsen wrote: > Hi Esther, > > Well, I suppose we could buy them, since they don't offer demos unless you > request them, and even then it's not always the case they let you download > one. That having been said, since the prices seem to be the same for both > Windows and OS X now which is a lot more reasonable, it wouldn't break the > bank. > > That aside, I doubt it'll be as good as Infovox ivox, unfortunately. I tried > building a speech synth upon Apple's instructions, and that didn't get as > good results as the work with Infovox. I don't know how Assistiveware managed > to make it work as well as it does, but at any rate, that'd certainly be > useful information for other developers such as Ivona, who's also very > interested in making it work well with VoiceOver. > > Regards, > Nicolai > On May 4, 2013, at 1:58 PM, Esther <mori...@mac-access.net> wrote: > >> Hi, >> I answered a post about other voices for the Mac a few weeks ago with this >> information. I also had one of the Cereproc voices from the same period >> that Nic describes, and I had to delete it because it crashed VoiceOver on >> my Mac. I quite liked the voice, which was one of their Scottish voices, >> and It may have been possible to use it for TTS only, but I noticed that my >> Mac froze up on one occasion (not just the VoiceOver crashes), so I had to >> uninstall it. >> >> On the other hand, I noted that Cereproc built a custom voice for the late >> film critic, Roger Ebert, who had to use his Mac and VoiceOver as a >> substitute voice when he lost the ability to speak in one of the operations >> for cancer of the larynx. Maybe they've improved? He certainly couldn't >> have used their voice for him if it froze up his Mac as much as it did for >> us. >> >> I'd like to know if the Cereproc voices are a reasonable option now, because >> I did like the sound of the voice. If I were being mischievous though, I'd >> ask whether Siri has difficulty understanding the voice >> >> Josh, if you want to hear what their voices for Obama and Bush are like, you >> can get either the free iSpeech Obama or iSpeech Bush iOS apps. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Esther >> >> On May 3, 2013, at 11:21 PM, Nicolai Svendsen <chojiro1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hi! >>> >>> I tried this with VoiceOver, and they were absolutely terrible to work >>> with. I'd maybe hear one phrase spoken, then the voice would crash. Even >>> then, the voice was truly unresponsive, even if I used the voice without >>> VoiceOver. >>> >>> I just had another look, and it seems that the male voices disappeared for >>> British English. It has been a while since I tried these, but at the time >>> they didn't seem very interested in hearing my crash logs, but that might >>> have changed. >>> >>> Regards, >>> Nicolai >>> On May 4, 2013, at 8:29 AM, Mrs. Lynnette Annabel Smith >>> <ly...@mac-access.net> wrote: >>> >>>> Hello everybody >>>> >>>> Have any of you tried the CereProc voices for OS X? These voices are >>>> developed by a company based in Scotland, here in the UK. They do several >>>> voices and also have a number of companies who have incorporated the >>>> voices into their own solutions. They are so good that I bought Gordon a >>>> couple of them. They are almost as good as the Acapella voices and, at >>>> just over £21 each, they are a snip at the price. >>>> You can find the voices here: >>>> <http://www.cereproc.com/> >>>> >>>> I would be interested to hear any informed opinion. >>>> >>>> He >>>> >>> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. 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