Hi all I was very interested to read the stuff floating around in various places regarding the Ivona voices. Unless I'm missing a trick, however, the only English language voice support is United State English. Personally speaking, I still believe that the InfoVox Desktop version 3.0 for Windows has much more to offer than Ivona does. I tried the Ivona voices briefly over the weekend and came away encouraged, but not convinced. I believe that nothing has yet stolen Acapella Grou's crown, they're still king of the road cross-platform as far as I'm concerned. They have much more versatility and I honestly believe that when you set US voice against US voice, Acapella Group's InfoVox Desktop v3.0 for Windows still comes out tops.
Of course, it's only fair to give Ivona credit for the good work they're doing. It's not at all bad technology, please don't anybody get the idea that I'm slamming them, definitely not. I also think that their prices are more attractive than those of Acapella Group, as is availability. Were it not for the fact that my other half bought me a USB thumb drive version of the InfoVox voices, (known as the "InKey" version), I'd no doubt still be stuck with Nuance's RealSpeak, as I believe it's now branded. Daniel, Leigh, Karen and the rest are not too bad, but not a patch on either Ivona or InfoVox. One thing which really irritates the hell out of me with the Nuance voices is their persistent changing of text displayed to something entirely different. Apple is guilty of this crime with their speech API as well. For instance, the phrase "Downloading at 100 K/Secretary" means absolutely nothing to me. Why, oh why, I wonder, must they try to distort what's actually being displ ayed on screen by changing it to something else? I know that Travis and I have discussed this gripe several times and I think we're in full agreement. The job of the screen-reader and the speech synthesiser is to impart to the user what is actually there rather than what nameless people think we want to hear. Anyway, just my little bit for whatever it's worth. If Ivona comes up with a British voice then I'll seriously think about it. Development of that kind should always be encouraged. Gordon ======================================= The Techno-Chat E-Mail forum is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free To modify your subscription options, please visit for forum's dedicated web pages located at http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/techno-chat You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Techno-Chat group at either of the following websites: http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/techno-chat/index.html Or: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> you may also subscribe to this list via RSS. The feed is at: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> ---------------------------------------
