Hi Anne, Mary, Marie, Yuma, and Others,
Anne, I was thinking about the Read2Me app on the iPhone, which I got
when you first mentioned it used the Acapela voices. Marie's correct
that most of these voice offerings are targeted at developers who use
the voices in increasingly popular spoken content for the iPhone and
other smart phones. Good examples are the turn-by-turn navigation
apps. Do any of these applications support controlling the speed of
the voice? With the Read2Me app, you either used the Acapela voice at
the default rate, or used VoiceOver's voices and bypassed the Acapela
voices if you wanted to use VoiceOver's speaking rate. If audiobooks
are narrated, I generally don't speed up content. But if I'm using
the voice to read eBook content, then I want to be able to control the
rate.
The other possible issue is that voices that are just used for text-to-
speech don't necessarily behave as well with the much wider range of
VoiceOver functions. The Loquendo voices that Claudio posted about a
few days ago sound great -- I bet that was the mail Russian voice that
Mary liked. But I think that developer also aims to provide voices
for application developers, and not for sale as general system
voices. I'm recalling that when I tried the Cereproc voices they
crashed VoiceOver, and we're also seeing the same kind of stability
problems with the Cepstral voices in Snow Leopard, though that will
probably get sorted.
Incidentally, I did look through the other apps that were using the
Acapela voices last Fall, when Anne reported on Read2Me, but I didn't
find any other apps on their web pages that were of interest, aside
from the app Anne recommended. Now that we have Kobo Books for eBook
reading, I find I don't use Read2Me very much because of the voice
speed limitations. I might use the Read2Me app more if loading up
ePub formats could be supported and handled in a simple manner.
Cheers,
Esther
Anne Robertson wrote:
The Acapela voices are already used in the Read2Me app on the iPhone.
Cheers,
Anne
On Apr 16, 2010, at 6:14 PM, marie Howarth wrote:
how much are they though and from what I read in the article, its
more for developers? I don't see how they fit in with voice over or
maybe I'm just being dumb.
On 16 Apr 2010, at 17:09, Mary Otten wrote:
Oh I would love these to come to the IPhone/.IPod with the next os
release. For book reading, Samantha would be kind of a drag.
mary
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
