[bballe336]

I'm looking for a decent text to speech program/voice to listen to books and papers and things. I'm on tiger, and the stock voices are pretty horrible and the speech is really jagged and just pretty poor, is leopard any better in this respect? I also tried some of the voices from cepstral, and didn't really think they were that great either. Is there anything better out there?

Thanks for any help!

[Big Mac]

You may want to upgrade to Leopard because there is one new quite high quality voice included (Alex), a feature which Apple failed to publicize.

[moonmonkey]

Leopard has one new voice called Alex which is a lot better than the old ones.
I don't think is a massive jump from the old ones though.

Edit: damn I type to slow.

[bballe336]

Thanks for the info guys, how much better is the voice though? And is it just that one voice that's any good?

[SpaceMonkey]

The only really-really good text to speech software I know is more high-end corporate market stuff.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by bballe336 

Thanks for the info guys, how much better is the voice though? And is it just that one voice that's any good?

Alex

[bballe336]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

Alex

Thanks, that sounds alright, maybe I'm just being too picky but the voice still doesn't sound too natural.

[- - e r i k - -]

http://www.digitalfuturesoft.com/tex...sxcheckout.php

Any product that uses AT&T's Natural Voices will do you. Apparently that product has a 50% off offer that ends today.

[- - e r i k - -]

And here's a demo of the voices:

http://www.digitalfuturesoft.com/tex...sformacosx.php

[bballe336]

Those are the same as the cepstral voices. Thanks for the help everyone, I guess I'm just stuck reading because none of these voices seem like they're that great.

[Veltliner]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

You may want to upgrade to Leopard because there is one new quite high quality voice included (Alex), a feature which Apple failed to publicize.

Not Alexa? What if I want a woman talking?