Hi! Thanks for this. Then i guess i will stick with Ivox and maybe Alex. /A > 8 sep. 2015 kl. 05:04 skrev Sabahattin Gucukoglu <[email protected]>: > > Summary: CereVoice and Cepstral are too crash-prone, laggy and inaccurate to > be bothering with for any serious uses. Stick to what Apple provides, plus > Acapela as a fair second. > > I had sufficient data on my 3G plan that I thought I’d get the two TTS > engines. The trials were inadequate to test screen reader performance, of > course. And the test strings always sound much better than anything you > provide, if for no other reason than that reading is a very different > experience from using a screen reader. > > The costs are not too favourable. There are 19 English-speaking CereVoice > voices, at £25.99 each (about $39.70). Then there’s a per-voice care > package, at £17.99 each (about $27.48). For Cepstral, there are 21 voices > including a few novelty voices such as dog and Whispery, each going for $35. > For comparison, InfoVox iVox voice credits can be bought, one a voice for > installation on one computer (yay for the curse that is activation!), for > $14.99 each, and there are discounts for purchases of 5 or more (20%), 15 or > more (30%), 30 or more (40%) and 125 or more (50%); if I were to purchase the > 40 voices I now have for one Mac, it would cost just $359.76. > > You download the voices from the web pages at the sites; Cepstral voices are > also demos, while CereVoice requires you log into an account and use a > short-lived but refreshable download link (10 minutes) for each voice. > VoiceOver couldn’t activate the links inside tables, as it so often doesn’t; > I had to save the page source and tamper with it to make the links clickable. > As you may imagine, the latter presented some difficulty for me on 3G; I > ended up scripting the retrieval of the downloads on a remote machine and > then downloading them to my local machine at my own leisure. Both engines > are provided as OS X installer packages, one per voice, but nothing like > iVox; there are no central accounts, only a license key for each voice. > Cepstral was markedly better here, with the installers being at least > scriptable using the installer command, and the keys entered in System > Preferences; CereVoice popped up a license dialog during installation that > requested a fiddly multi-line key that you copied and pasted from email, so > while it could be mostly automated, one had to be careful to dump information > into Terminal to find out which package you were licensing. The packages > contain the voice, the engine and the license management framework, so > duplication and wasted download time and bandwidth. Still, there is > something to be said for avoiding having an agent watch over your shoulder > using the Internet activation system, as is the case with iVox. Tragically, > Cepstral made the supreme mistake of calling their TTS engine “swift”, and > the even more unfortunate misstep of installing a binary, /usr/bin/swift, to > offer command-line playback. And yes, that overwrites the binary put their > by the operating system and Xcode. This OS installation is trashed. > > As to the voices themselves, it was very refreshing to see so much British > diversity in CereVoice, but mostly because the company is based in Scotland > and therefore presumably liable to get more British and Scottish voices. > Cepstral, by contrast, only really offered two UK voices, and the rest are US > english. Obviously this is a concern more for off-worlders (i.e., people not > living in the US) but I’m not really familiar enough with the accents of > other English-speaking countries outside the US or UK, so I can’t really say. > All of the voices are passable for different kinds of reading, CereVoice > more so than Cepstral, in my opinion, but they are simply unusable for > VoiceOver. They lag, freeze, crash, overlap themselves in times of stress—in > short, only use for dedicated reading applications. My favourites are > CereVoice Sarah and Cepstral Laurence. > > Maybe I will reinstall these voices in future, for my entertainment or if > they are updated. CereVoice additionally charges for support and > maintenance, which I ultimately paid. However, I don’t recommend anybody > else get them. The costs aren’t really justified for that. Some might argue > that any money spent on TTS is too much, or that we don’t have real choices > or anything formant, but at least iVox gives you a nice, responsive > alternative to the incumbents. Perhaps Mac OS isn’t a platform either vendor > would prefer to support; certain things, like the way the packages are > installed, certainly suggest it. Still, as I said at the top, I don’t think > it’s worth the bother, and there’s a very strong likelihood that the day I > reinstall these voices will never come. > > -- > 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.
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