Wizzard ships AT&T Natural Voices Panther, Tiger

Wizzard Software today announced that AT&T Natural Voices for Mac OS v10.3 Panther and v10.4 Tiger are now available for purchase in English, French, German and Spanish. The voices can be used by application developers to incorporate Text-To-Speech into a variety of Mac applications, including those for accessibility, business automation, security systems and education. Named "Technology of the Year" in 2002 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," according to Wizzard. AT&T Natural Voices offers "plug-and-play" language support and doesn't require different engines for each language. The company says that the AT&T technology also provides "exceptionally" high channel density. SDKs are available for desktop ($300 per voice) and telephony ($1000 per voice) applications.

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Mithras

not a drop-in replacement

07/13, 11:16am, EDT

I was hoping that this would be a drop-in replacement for the OS X voices, like the Cepstral and other recent products. But as indicated by the article, this just an SDK to use for custom applications. Too bad.

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technohedz

lame

07/13, 4:30pm, EDT

I was impressed w/ the voices included w/ some freeware that came w/ a tdk mp3 player for windows, but none of the sample ATT voices come close. The Cepstral and Acapela voices sound a lot better. With most TTS vendors they rob you for the sdk and engine just to get a voice, then rip you off again for deployment; and sadly most of them aren't even as good as the default junk. $300 for one voice? Not for telephony use? Have you heard the samples? This is junk and it's a rip off. The best hope for mac TTS is for Apple to upgrade their engine/voices, or acquire some idiot company that tries to make money from blind people (corporate IVRS excluded).

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