For my amusement, I downloaded all the Nuance Vocaliser voices from Freedom Scientific that I normally use with VoiceOver on OS X. For added fun, I downloaded all versions of the voices (standard from RealSpeak Solo and premium and premium-high for Vocaliser and Vocaliser Expressive). From this I established a few interesting things:
I enjoyed using Vocaliser Expressive rather more on JAWS than I normally do in VoiceOver. This was a very pleasant surprise. There is no startup delay, and the voice is smooth and doesn’t incorrectly pronounce stray punctuation marks while reading text. I found it more responsive even than Eloquence in my XP virtual machine, but not more responsive than the version in OS X. More significantly, though, the OS X and iOS version of the synthesiser has a very strange behaviour of raising the pitch, where the JAWS version doesn’t. To illustrate, try comparing JAWS and VoiceOver saying “Notes”. This I had always attributed to the expressive nature of Vocaliser Expressive, thinking that the previous version was only of better quality because it didn’t exhibit that behaviour. But now I hear, using JAWS, that Expressive is indeed an improvement in several key areas of inflection. In case you’re wondering, I honestly didn’t see much to shout about in the Expressive versions compared to the similar-quality Vocaliser 5 versions. Indeed, I wish Apple would offer the lower-quality premium voices as opposed to compact. My Sara unit is still using the standard-quality Realspeak technology, and one of the nice things about that is that you don’t have to listen too hard to pick out the subtle consonants like Ss. I’d’ve been just fine if Apple had not moved on to the Expressive voices. However you slice it, concatenative synthesis is fundamentally limited by the accuracy of the sound samples. Does anybody have any thoughts? -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries@googlegroups.com/ --- 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 macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
