Alex, it ain't just you dude. Alex is tons better than he used to be in every respect you mentioned. Much smoother, faster, way more responsive, and, other than Fred, which I am using at the moment for strictly sentamintal purposes, Alex is the best of all the voices out there. In fact, he's better even than the Acapela voices which, if I may be frank, have taken severle steps backward from where they used to be.
Sincerely, The Constantly Barefooted Ray Still a happy Mac, Verizon Wireless iPhone 6+ and Apple TV user! Sent from my Mac, the only computer with full accessibility for the blind built-in > On Feb 8, 2015, at 6:41 PM, Alex Hall <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi all, > First, yes, this is about a speech synthesizer, and will thus be very > subjective. I wanted to see, though, if anyone else might have come to the > same conclusion I have. > > I got a Mac in the days of Lion, and quickly switched to the Vocalizer voices > (Serena or Lee, mostly). When we got new ones in Mavericks, I favored Ava, > and she is still among the best voices I know of, except a couple from Ivona. > In testing things for Yosemite, I kept switching from Ava to Alex, just to > see if any problems were being caused by the use of Nuance voices. I > accidentally made a startling discovery: Alex used to be pretty bad a few > years ago, but now, he's quite good. I've always liked the breathing thing, > but Alex would constantly run words together, mispronounce syllables, and > have other small problems that made him hard to understand, especially at > higher speeds. The more I use him in Yosemite, though, the more I look for > reasons to switch back to Ava, but the more those reasons allude me. Ava > misses the period after certain words, like "app", Alex doesn't; Ava says > "capital" before uppercase letters, although that setting is disabled, and > Alex doesn't; VoiceOver has delays when opening the VO Utility or bringing up > VO menus while using Nuance voices, but with Alex, I find no such delays; and > more. > > So, is it just me, or has Alex gotten way better? I don't mean "better" in > that VoiceOver runs faster while using Alex, although it certainly does. I > mean "better" in that, compared to a few years ago, he's far clearer when > speaking and makes far fewer mistakes. Maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe I'm > the only one to notice, since the change was likely gradual and thus > invisible to those who have used Alex all along. Either way, I'm interested > in hearing your thoughts, and I'm more eager than ever to obtain a 64-bit > iPhone so I can start using Alex there as well. My only complaint about Alex > is that he doesn't speed up very well - sure, he can go crazy fast, but I > find I miss things at more than 70% speaking rate. Anyway, what do you all > think? If you haven't used Alex in a long time, give him another chance. If > you use him all the time, have you noticed anything? > > -- > Have a great day, > Alex Hall > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries > <http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
