Steve talked about wanting new speech technology ... here it is!
I can distinctly remember SJ making a comment that Apple was considering new technology. A month or so back I downloaded the Macosx demo of Elan Sayso and it is impressive... However, it now is apparent that this no mention of new speech technology was made at the WWDC. This is a real shame as Elan Sayso would be a huge improvement!
If you're interested then download the demo at:
http://www.elanspeech.com/demos/sayso.html
My question to you is: what do you think about the current state of speech on the Mac. Any of you use it?? Petition anybody ;-)
Yep I do and have new mails (sender and subject) read to me in Entourage and also alerts in iChat...
If you're interested then download the demo at:
http://www.elanspeech.com/demos/sayso.html
My question to you is: what do you think about the current state of speech on the Mac. Any of you use it?? Petition anybody ;-)
Yep I do and have new mails (sender and subject) read to me in Entourage and also alerts in iChat...
Comments
I think there is a lot of work that could be done on Apple's part, and there is no evidence that any of it is
Originally posted by thebimbo
I can distinctly remember SJ making a comment that Apple was considering new technology. A month or so back I downloaded the Macosx demo of Elan Sayso and it is impressive... However, it now is apparent that this no mention of new speech technology was made at the WWDC. This is a real shame as Elan Sayso would be a huge improvement!
If you're interested then download the demo at:
http://www.elanspeech.com/demos/sayso.html
My question to you is: what do you think about the current state of speech on the Mac. Any of you use it?? Petition anybody ;-)
Yep I do and have new mails (sender and subject) read to me in Entourage and also alerts in iChat...
Originally posted by LoCash
I was rather unimpressed by the demo. It's what we have now, but slightly more polished. It's like a '79 El Dorado with a fresh paint job.
Locash, did you download the actual demo or just sample the MP3s?
Having pitch shifting in addition to the speed really adds range to the voice.
The cadence is far improved and sound quality is far better.
Give me Elan Sayso over the Mac OS useless joke voices anyday...(only about 3 are actualy usable)
Typing naughty stuff into TextEdit and having my Mac speak still impresses and cracks up PC people.
Sure, it sounds better than Macintalk, but I don't want that talking to me. Still not usable in my opinion, but maybe someone else wouldn't mind that voice talking to them.
So yeah, it's an improvement, and it represents progress... but I don't feel this is a hell of a lot of progress over what we currently use, which is very dated.
(By the way, Aquatic, I deleted your double post.)
So I looked it up
This is from a bullet list of features...
MacinTalk 3 requires 33MHz 68030 or faster Macs with System 7, and offers fancier pitch control and effect voices.
I'm pretty sure that means there was pitch control in some form.
Speech Manager
But I think Macintalk proper did not. But point taken in that "something" prior to ELAN had pitch shifting on the Mac...