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yoyoman · 12:43 PM

http://www.wizzardsoftware.com/
AT&T Natural Voices head for Mac platform
Wizzard Software announced today that AT&T Natural Voices will soon be available for Mac. Named "Technology of the Year" by Frost & Sullivan, AT&T's Natural Voices product line is "widely considered to be one of the most human-sounding speech synthesis systems in the world." Wizzard says it will make this technology available to Apple application developers. Natural Voices has already "been licensed by Wizzard to a growing number of developers to be used in a variety of environments." Bruce Phifer said Natural Voices is currently "enjoying incredible popularity in the Windows and Linux environments." Wizzard did not specify when Natural Voices would become available to the public.

When do you think it will come out?

I have been waiting for something better than what comes with osx for months and months.

Appleman · Jun 2, 2005, 12:32 PM

Once bought IBM Via Voice and was quite disappointed. Although it sounds promising, it really has a long way to come, and specially foreign accents makes it hard to use. Probably native speakers have more chance not to repair all errors the program makes.
It seems they still haven't upgraded the program since the first port to OS X. That's a couple of years ! ago!

Luca Rescigno · Jun 2, 2005, 12:33 PM

Uh, AT&T Natural Voices isn't a voice recognition software, it's text-to-speech software.

Appleman · Jun 2, 2005, 12:35 PM

Originally Posted by Luca Rescigno

Uh, AT&T Natural Voices isn't a voice recognition software, it's text-to-speech software.

o, sorry, misunderstood then.

Luca Rescigno · Jun 2, 2005, 12:41 PM

Yeah, voice recognition has a lot farther to go than text-to-speech. Natural Voices are amazingly good, but I've never heard of a surprisingly usable voice recognition software. Even the professional stuff (like Via Voice) is pretty disappointing.

yoyoman · Jun 2, 2005, 12:44 PM

So when will some one upgrade the ones that are stock on osx. Those are all the way back from os9

analogika · Jun 2, 2005, 12:47 PM

Originally Posted by yoyoman

So when will some one upgrade the ones that are stock on osx. Those are all the way back from os9

Correction: System 6

(only the "high-quality" ones are newer, dating, IIRC, to earlier versions of OS X.

Luca Rescigno · Jun 2, 2005, 12:54 PM

It has been improving, but VERY slowly. I think originally it only came with the "Fred" voice. They added several more over time, later adding the "High Quality" versions, and finally they added a slightly better one (Vicki) in Panther. But it still sucks and it's very difficult to understand anything they say.

yoyoman · Jun 2, 2005, 01:03 PM

4 + years and nothing. lol

tooki · Jun 2, 2005, 02:09 PM

Originally Posted by analogika

Correction: System 6

(only the "high-quality" ones are newer, dating, IIRC, to earlier versions of OS X.

Actually, the earliest voices date back to 1983, running on prerelease versions of System 1.

There were some high-quality voices introduced with the AV Quadras, too. They were later improved further.

tooki

Mithras · Jun 3, 2005, 07:53 AM

I've been using the Cepstral David voice for awhile now. It's much better than Apple's voices; I look forward to the AT&T voices!

Big Mac · Jun 3, 2005, 08:02 AM

Originally Posted by tooki

Actually, the earliest voices date back to 1983, running on prerelease versions of System 1.

There were some high-quality voices introduced with the AV Quadras, too. They were later improved further.

tooki

And to continue the story (since I find it interesting), the original MacInTalk was written for Apple by an outside developer, and Apple never got the source code back. Thus, the software was rewritten and rebranded MacInTalk Pro. The funny thing is, if you go back and listen to/watch the Mac's introduction, at which the Mac speaks about coming out of its box for the first time, you'll hear a Fred that is, IMO, superior to the one we ended up with. It sounded a bit more natural. Judge for yourself. . .

krove · Jun 3, 2005, 01:24 PM

Yeah, there was some mention in the mac news in the last month or so about a company releasing new voices, Cepstral something, as stated above by Mithras.

Here is a link to Cepstral.

tooki · Jun 3, 2005, 01:33 PM

Originally Posted by Big Mac

And to continue the story (since I find it interesting), the original MacInTalk was written for Apple by an outside developer, and Apple never got the source code back. Thus, the software was rewritten and rebranded MacInTalk Pro. The funny thing is, if you go back and listen to/watch the Mac's introduction, at which the Mac speaks about coming out of its box for the first time, you'll hear a Fred that is, IMO, superior to the one we ended up with. It sounded a bit more natural. Judge for yourself. . .

Well, the demo was all sorts of hand-tweaked. I'm sure it wasn't just doing simple text-to-speech, but that the speech was hand-tuned.

tooki