..are utterly different in every way except in their overall stiffness and fakeness, which is what you really meant to criticise, especially when compared to other modern day voices.
Your mistake was phrasing it in such a way as to take the focus off aesthetic judgment and put it on actual implementation details or historical facts, which makes the index-finger-glasses-adjusting nerds come out of their dark hiding holes to correct you. "<nasal>Meh-meh!! Incorrectness! Error! Meh!! Actually, <snort> it was MEH 1991! You are wrong! MEH! Bruce!</nasal>" (Trying to imitate those geek noises).
Whichever prior/existing Apple voice anyone mentions, they are all subpar by 2005 standards. They are not as advanced as one would like them to be, considering the readily available options and state of the art. Sure, they work. But they are arguably not much different.
They would not pass the "Ask your grandmom" test. Anyone's grandmom would say they are identical, even though they aren't really.
Methinks the geeks are too close to their beloved Bruce, etc., to be able to make or take rational criticism.
Edit: Sorry, I just realized it was mostly Kickaha replying to him, sorry to accuse him of being a gang of geeks as opposed to one. I tend to not read poster's names in long threads at first.
Edit: Sorry, I just realized it was mostly Kickaha replying to him, sorry to accuse him of being a gang of geeks as opposed to one. I tend to not read poster's names in long threads at first.
BTW, am I the only one who does utterly perverse things with the ATT voices?
I've had so much fun on that site.
Try a Satanic prayer with the British voices. Chilling.
Try porn-type cliches in both male and female voices...etc.
But nothing beats www.ip-relay.com for weird fun...live people, who have to read aloud whatever you type, to whoever you want them to call. Oh god...the fun.
Wherever there is injustice against Apple, Kickha swoops down to save the day!
swoops down is being kind. i think he came on a bit too strong and apologist in this case. sometimes its bit overbearing to simply dismiss everything and create arguments that were not neccessary to create.
The voices in OS X, despite their recent improvements are still not much better than where we were over a decade ago. You can make up excuses, say Windows doesn't have it nearly as good, but the fact remains that little improvement has been seen in this area and whereas once Apple was way ahead of the curve they have once again let a compelling technology fall behind the times. Mac users and Apple used to take pride in their advantages and advancements, not participate in a pissing contest and be happy that we simply are a bit better than something, in this case Windows' speech capabilities.
No argument there, but come on... to spout incorrect facts and overblown assertions isn't any way to make a point.
I completely agree that the voices haven't improved much (if at all) in several years, and it's sad to see such a lead frittered away. BUT... to compare those voices to the leading technological edge in the market, instead of the actual competition, and rant that the Mac voices aren't up to snuff to *that* level, so they are just an 'embarrassment'... total lack of perspective in my mind, not to mention maturity.
You may as well say that because the PowerMac doesn't have the speed of a dedicated blade system that it's an 'embarrassment'. Doesn't wash. Toss in the lack of actual facts, and the credibility drops near zero in my eyes.
Get the facts straight, form an opinion on them, and then express it in something other than a rant, and it'll be a lot better accepted. This thread started out with three strikes against it.
Now, to get back to the topic at hand, one reason I can see for the lack of research is that there's been a lack of *use* as far as I can see. Who actually uses text-to-speech for anything other than as a toy? VoiceOver is the first serious practical useful application I've seen of text to speech, and I think it will spur greater development. TTS was rather a solution looking for a problem, which isn't how Apple operates anymore. They used to, and they almost died out from it.
Steve said some years ago that Apple was looking around for voice tech to acquire. That was pretty much the last of that.
More recently, some of the PlainTalk voices got much larger, and better capable of handling nuances in language.
So they've been looking at the problem. I'm sure that if they do come up with a really good solution—in house, or licensed, or purchased—we'll hear about it. But the fallback seems to be an effort to update the PlainTalk voices.
I was just about to ask if anyone remembered Steve saying that (I'm glad I finished reading the posts before I asked)...
It was quite a few years ago (maybe it was as far back as the 1st or 2nd "Steve iCEO keynotes"... Seems strange that nothing ever came of it given that at the time it was important enough to bring up at a keynote.
total lack of perspective in my mind, not to mention maturity.
Let me point out that I have not gotten personal (until now arguably), even when faced with you attacking - not just the credibility of my post - but my personal credibilty (the way I read it at least). But you will not stop the ad-homs and now you attack the level of my maturity as well.
Let me remind you that your first reply to my post was to mostly disregard the point of my topic and instead go into a rather pointless discussion (or "monolgue" really) about the origin of the voices, correctly pointing out an error I made but then harping on and on about my mistake post after post.
Is that what you consider mature? Is that what you consider having perspective in your response? (of course if the goal is to kill the thread and detract attention from the point of the subject, then perhaps it is, or perhaps not)
I tried to keep the thread on topic and apologised for the factual error I made, but you continue ad-hom'ing me. And that is not only a significant lack of maturity and debating skill when posting, but it is also, and more seriously, a disgrace for a "moderator" to do so.
I expect an apology from you.
[EDIT: And btw, I am aware that I was too harsh in my wording of the original topic post. I still think the quality of the voices (as heard in the demo) is an embarassment to Mac OS X 10.4 but my general tone and phrasing in that post was arguably too "angry", and not very eloquent at all. So it came out the wrong way, unfortunately attracting attention away from the point (especially to those who do not like that point to be made, it seems). That, however, does not in any way excuse Kickaha's behavior though. I'm not going to just roll over and take continuous abuse from anyone, not even some - more or less - anonymous person on the internet.]
The voice used in the demo is absolutely horrendously bad and technically outdated - it's the exact same voice as used back on the original mac in 1984, with no (or very little) noticeable improvements! That's bad! And it's totally unacceptable in 2005.
OMG, your review is quite a bit more forgiving than my opinion. Talk about a slap in the fucking face for someone who is visually impared. Sure, Microsofts version sucks even more, but then again, if Apple looked towards Microsoft as the gold standard, OSX would be quite a bit different.
Sure, not a lot of people would use this feature, but that's like saying "Not a lot of people use stair ramps, so why build them?"
[EDIT: And btw, I am aware that I was too harsh in my wording of the original topic post. I still think the quality of the voices (as heard in the demo) is an embarassment to Mac OS X 10.4 but my general tone and phrasing in that post was arguably too "angry", and not very eloquent at all.
I don;t think that's any excuse for Kickaha's extremely inapropriate behaviour.
I am a bit disappointed with the quality of the voices as well. When I heard about this functionality I became very excited and signed up to become a beta tester. When Apple made it an non removable add on to 10.3 I decided against it. When I now see the result I am glad I didn´t risk a reinstall of X on one of my machines for such an underwhelming experience.
BUT one thing to keep in mind: Those who benefits from this tech is not used to great speech synt in the first place. They are merely used to almost non-understandable speech they have to adjust to, not the other way around. Power Apple: Try to dig through the archives of www.dr.dk/harddiskenHarddisken. They have had a couple of feature about speech synt and from the examples they have aired Apple is way ahead even with decade old quality.
BUT one thing to keep in mind: Those who benefits from this tech is not used to great speech synt in the first place. They are merely used to almost non-understandable speech they have to adjust to, not the other way around.
True, but this time Apple advertises it as a major feaure of Tiger. I think because of that alone we aree entitled to expect more in regard to quality.
Quote:
Power Apple: Try to dig through the archives of www.dr.dk/harddiskenHarddisken. They have had a couple of feature about speech synt and from the examples they have aired Apple is way ahead even with decade old quality.
I listened to this show about text-to-speech (in Danish). Very interesting. But in fact I think it supports my original point that Apple should use higher quality voices. Remember this is text-to-speech for the Danish language alone, developed by Aalborg University, and they are capable of developing something that sounds as good as "Bruce" with probably rather limited fonds (even though it's financed by TDC). The development and market for English is so much bigger. They also admit (on the show) that there are much higher quality speech-synthesis available in English.
PA, I was discussing the general case of such sitations with applenut, not you specifically. No, I'm not going to apologize, nor do I see that my behaviour was inappropriate. Pretty simple in mind: make erroneous statements, get corrected, move on. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that's going to happen here, from multiple parties, so I'm bowing out.
It is true that disabled people are used to truly horrendous accessibility software, but I have to agree with the cool gut that the fact that everyone else sucks is no reason to aim low.
There is one issue that speech synthesis has now that it didn't have when Fred told the world how glad he was to be out of that box: English isn't enough anymore. You know how bloated OS X gets when you install support for every single language? Well, now add the phonemes and grammars to support speech in every language OS X can display.
This means that you have to multiply any difference in size between a newer and an older technology (e.g., Vicki and Victoria, or either one and an AT&T Natural Voice) by the number of languages supported, in order to assess the impact on the system. Now, to be honest, I haven't read through the links to AT&T's site in this thread yet, so I can't rule it out or not rule it out as an option. Apple can also roll multilingual support out gradually (and I think they will, since that's what they do most of the time), but they still have to make sure that the default install doesn't gobble up all your hard drive space. People are still installing and using OS X on 10GB and smaller drives.
I really wouldn't mind if Apple pruned out some of the silly voices. Fred, Bruce, Vicki and a couple of others would be fine. (I don't know why, but I just love the Fred voice. It's that drunken-Swede-in-a-barrel quality, I guess.)
Food for thought, anyway. I do know for sure that if Apple could demonstrate clear, lifelike synthesized speech, they'd blow people away. Disabled customers have been waiting a long time for a completely accessible OS X, and it behooves Apple to deliver a solution as slick as their solutions for the not yet disabled.
I hold no grudge and I do hope we shall meet and discuss matters of Apple (and technology) in other threads here on AppleInsider, and that it will be in a more pleasent tone. But I see no reason why not, heck, we might even agree on something
Now, back on topic, I listened to the voices in Ichiban_jay's link, and allthough not as good as ATT is still goes to show that there actually are many options available.
back in 95 I prepared a dozen or so sentences in Simple Text and then called a friend of mine. I had my Mac converse with him for a minute. Was quite entertaining as I selected sentences then had my Mac say them.
back in 95 I prepared a dozen or so sentences in Simple Text and then called a friend of mine. I had my Mac converse with him for a minute. Was quite entertaining as I selected sentences then had my Mac say them.
yeah. off topic. sue me
Not nearly as fun as when my roomate in college got jealous that my mac could talk, and downloaded "bonzi buddy" so his PC could too. He told "Bonzi Buddy" that his name was "Sexy Man", and for about three weeks afterward, we'd get woken up in the middle of the night by his machine screaming "DO YOU WANT A WEATHER REPORT SEXY MAN?"
Ah, the good old days. It took him forever to get that POS completely removed from his machine.
Comments
The voice at: 3:06 - 3:40 in the 1984 introduction:
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov
and the voice in:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/voiceover.html
..are utterly different in every way except in their overall stiffness and fakeness, which is what you really meant to criticise, especially when compared to other modern day voices.
Your mistake was phrasing it in such a way as to take the focus off aesthetic judgment and put it on actual implementation details or historical facts, which makes the index-finger-glasses-adjusting nerds come out of their dark hiding holes to correct you. "<nasal>Meh-meh!! Incorrectness! Error! Meh!! Actually, <snort> it was MEH 1991! You are wrong! MEH! Bruce!</nasal>" (Trying to imitate those geek noises).
Whichever prior/existing Apple voice anyone mentions, they are all subpar by 2005 standards. They are not as advanced as one would like them to be, considering the readily available options and state of the art. Sure, they work. But they are arguably not much different.
They would not pass the "Ask your grandmom" test. Anyone's grandmom would say they are identical, even though they aren't really.
Methinks the geeks are too close to their beloved Bruce, etc., to be able to make or take rational criticism.
Edit: Sorry, I just realized it was mostly Kickaha replying to him, sorry to accuse him of being a gang of geeks as opposed to one.
Originally posted by johnq
Edit: Sorry, I just realized it was mostly Kickaha replying to him, sorry to accuse him of being a gang of geeks as opposed to one.
Hey, that's *Mister* Geek to you, buddy...
I've had so much fun on that site.
Try a Satanic prayer with the British voices. Chilling.
Try porn-type cliches in both male and female voices...etc.
But nothing beats www.ip-relay.com for weird fun...live people, who have to read aloud whatever you type, to whoever you want them to call. Oh god...the fun.
Originally posted by BRussell
Wherever there is injustice against Apple, Kickha swoops down to save the day!
swoops down is being kind. i think he came on a bit too strong and apologist in this case. sometimes its bit overbearing to simply dismiss everything and create arguments that were not neccessary to create.
The voices in OS X, despite their recent improvements are still not much better than where we were over a decade ago. You can make up excuses, say Windows doesn't have it nearly as good, but the fact remains that little improvement has been seen in this area and whereas once Apple was way ahead of the curve they have once again let a compelling technology fall behind the times. Mac users and Apple used to take pride in their advantages and advancements, not participate in a pissing contest and be happy that we simply are a bit better than something, in this case Windows' speech capabilities.
I completely agree that the voices haven't improved much (if at all) in several years, and it's sad to see such a lead frittered away. BUT... to compare those voices to the leading technological edge in the market, instead of the actual competition, and rant that the Mac voices aren't up to snuff to *that* level, so they are just an 'embarrassment'... total lack of perspective in my mind, not to mention maturity.
You may as well say that because the PowerMac doesn't have the speed of a dedicated blade system that it's an 'embarrassment'. Doesn't wash. Toss in the lack of actual facts, and the credibility drops near zero in my eyes.
Get the facts straight, form an opinion on them, and then express it in something other than a rant, and it'll be a lot better accepted. This thread started out with three strikes against it.
Now, to get back to the topic at hand, one reason I can see for the lack of research is that there's been a lack of *use* as far as I can see. Who actually uses text-to-speech for anything other than as a toy? VoiceOver is the first serious practical useful application I've seen of text to speech, and I think it will spur greater development. TTS was rather a solution looking for a problem, which isn't how Apple operates anymore. They used to, and they almost died out from it.
Originally posted by Kickaha
You're a sick bastich, I knew there was a reason I liked you.
Originally posted by Amorph
Steve said some years ago that Apple was looking around for voice tech to acquire. That was pretty much the last of that.
More recently, some of the PlainTalk voices got much larger, and better capable of handling nuances in language.
So they've been looking at the problem. I'm sure that if they do come up with a really good solution—in house, or licensed, or purchased—we'll hear about it. But the fallback seems to be an effort to update the PlainTalk voices.
I was just about to ask if anyone remembered Steve saying that (I'm glad I finished reading the posts before I asked)...
It was quite a few years ago (maybe it was as far back as the 1st or 2nd "Steve iCEO keynotes"... Seems strange that nothing ever came of it given that at the time it was important enough to bring up at a keynote.
Dave
Originally posted by Kickaha
total lack of perspective in my mind, not to mention maturity.
Let me point out that I have not gotten personal (until now arguably), even when faced with you attacking - not just the credibility of my post - but my personal credibilty (the way I read it at least). But you will not stop the ad-homs and now you attack the level of my maturity as well.
Let me remind you that your first reply to my post was to mostly disregard the point of my topic and instead go into a rather pointless discussion (or "monolgue" really) about the origin of the voices, correctly pointing out an error I made but then harping on and on about my mistake post after post.
Is that what you consider mature? Is that what you consider having perspective in your response? (of course if the goal is to kill the thread and detract attention from the point of the subject, then perhaps it is, or perhaps not)
I tried to keep the thread on topic and apologised for the factual error I made, but you continue ad-hom'ing me. And that is not only a significant lack of maturity and debating skill when posting, but it is also, and more seriously, a disgrace for a "moderator" to do so.
I expect an apology from you.
[EDIT: And btw, I am aware that I was too harsh in my wording of the original topic post. I still think the quality of the voices (as heard in the demo) is an embarassment to Mac OS X 10.4 but my general tone and phrasing in that post was arguably too "angry", and not very eloquent at all. So it came out the wrong way, unfortunately attracting attention away from the point (especially to those who do not like that point to be made, it seems). That, however, does not in any way excuse Kickaha's behavior though. I'm not going to just roll over and take continuous abuse from anyone, not even some - more or less - anonymous person on the internet.]
Another good voice synthesizer is Scansoft's RealSpeak, sounds almost real
http://scansoft.com/realspeak/demo/
certainly more languages to choose from... 20
Originally posted by Power Apple
The voice used in the demo is absolutely horrendously bad and technically outdated - it's the exact same voice as used back on the original mac in 1984, with no (or very little) noticeable improvements! That's bad! And it's totally unacceptable in 2005.
OMG, your review is quite a bit more forgiving than my opinion. Talk about a slap in the fucking face for someone who is visually impared. Sure, Microsofts version sucks even more, but then again, if Apple looked towards Microsoft as the gold standard, OSX would be quite a bit different.
Sure, not a lot of people would use this feature, but that's like saying "Not a lot of people use stair ramps, so why build them?"
Not impressed, not impressed at all.
Originally posted by Power Apple
[EDIT: And btw, I am aware that I was too harsh in my wording of the original topic post. I still think the quality of the voices (as heard in the demo) is an embarassment to Mac OS X 10.4 but my general tone and phrasing in that post was arguably too "angry", and not very eloquent at all.
I don;t think that's any excuse for Kickaha's extremely inapropriate behaviour.
I am a bit disappointed with the quality of the voices as well. When I heard about this functionality I became very excited and signed up to become a beta tester. When Apple made it an non removable add on to 10.3 I decided against it. When I now see the result I am glad I didn´t risk a reinstall of X on one of my machines for such an underwhelming experience.
BUT one thing to keep in mind: Those who benefits from this tech is not used to great speech synt in the first place. They are merely used to almost non-understandable speech they have to adjust to, not the other way around. Power Apple: Try to dig through the archives of www.dr.dk/harddiskenHarddisken. They have had a couple of feature about speech synt and from the examples they have aired Apple is way ahead even with decade old quality.
Originally posted by Anders
BUT one thing to keep in mind: Those who benefits from this tech is not used to great speech synt in the first place. They are merely used to almost non-understandable speech they have to adjust to, not the other way around.
True, but this time Apple advertises it as a major feaure of Tiger. I think because of that alone we aree entitled to expect more in regard to quality.
Power Apple: Try to dig through the archives of www.dr.dk/harddiskenHarddisken. They have had a couple of feature about speech synt and from the examples they have aired Apple is way ahead even with decade old quality.
I listened to this show about text-to-speech (in Danish). Very interesting. But in fact I think it supports my original point that Apple should use higher quality voices. Remember this is text-to-speech for the Danish language alone, developed by Aalborg University, and they are capable of developing something that sounds as good as "Bruce" with probably rather limited fonds (even though it's financed by TDC). The development and market for English is so much bigger. They also admit (on the show) that there are much higher quality speech-synthesis available in English.
And that is what Apple should go for imo
It is true that disabled people are used to truly horrendous accessibility software, but I have to agree with the cool gut that the fact that everyone else sucks is no reason to aim low.
There is one issue that speech synthesis has now that it didn't have when Fred told the world how glad he was to be out of that box: English isn't enough anymore. You know how bloated OS X gets when you install support for every single language? Well, now add the phonemes and grammars to support speech in every language OS X can display.
This means that you have to multiply any difference in size between a newer and an older technology (e.g., Vicki and Victoria, or either one and an AT&T Natural Voice) by the number of languages supported, in order to assess the impact on the system. Now, to be honest, I haven't read through the links to AT&T's site in this thread yet, so I can't rule it out or not rule it out as an option. Apple can also roll multilingual support out gradually (and I think they will, since that's what they do most of the time), but they still have to make sure that the default install doesn't gobble up all your hard drive space. People are still installing and using OS X on 10GB and smaller drives.
I really wouldn't mind if Apple pruned out some of the silly voices. Fred, Bruce, Vicki and a couple of others would be fine. (I don't know why, but I just love the Fred voice. It's that drunken-Swede-in-a-barrel quality, I guess.)
Food for thought, anyway. I do know for sure that if Apple could demonstrate clear, lifelike synthesized speech, they'd blow people away. Disabled customers have been waiting a long time for a completely accessible OS X, and it behooves Apple to deliver a solution as slick as their solutions for the not yet disabled.
Originally posted by Kickaha
so I'm bowing out.
I hold no grudge and I do hope we shall meet and discuss matters of Apple (and technology) in other threads here on AppleInsider, and that it will be in a more pleasent tone. But I see no reason why not, heck, we might even agree on something
Now, back on topic, I listened to the voices in Ichiban_jay's link, and allthough not as good as ATT is still goes to show that there actually are many options available.
yeah. off topic. sue me
Originally posted by ZO
back in 95 I prepared a dozen or so sentences in Simple Text and then called a friend of mine. I had my Mac converse with him for a minute. Was quite entertaining as I selected sentences then had my Mac say them.
yeah. off topic. sue me
Not nearly as fun as when my roomate in college got jealous that my mac could talk, and downloaded "bonzi buddy" so his PC could too. He told "Bonzi Buddy" that his name was "Sexy Man", and for about three weeks afterward, we'd get woken up in the middle of the night by his machine screaming "DO YOU WANT A WEATHER REPORT SEXY MAN?"
Ah, the good old days. It took him forever to get that POS completely removed from his machine.