Infovox iVox, VisioVoice

AssistiveWare today announced that it has partnered with Acapela Group to bring two new high quality speech solutions to Mac OS X: Infovox iVox and VisioVoice. In collaboration with AssistiveWare, Acapela Group has created Infovox iVox, an application that allows the naturally sounding, high-quality voices of the Acapela Group to be used in any Speech Manager compliant application on Mac OS X including applications such as TextEdit and AppleWorks, as well as many educational titles. Infovox iVox, which will be distributed worldwide by AssistiveWare, can also be used with Tiger's built-in VoiceOver screen reader; however, non-English users also need VisioVoice to hear all the VoiceOver menus and messages in their own language. Both products are expected at the end of June for $200 (US), $360 (Scandinavian), and $220 (Other European languages) or in a bundle with VisioVoice for $250 (US).

Infovox iVox will also be included as part of a bundle with AssistiveWare's upcoming VisioVoice product. VisioVoice is a product for blind and vision impaired Mac users that adds multilingual support to Apple's excellent VoiceOver technology (initially French, English and Dutch; other languages will follow) as well as providing a number of other speech and vision related features to enhance access to Mac OS X. These include: (1) the conversion of Word, HTML, PDF and RTF files to audio files or iPod-ready iTunes tracks; (2) Large cross-hair and target cursors; (3) Text and Image zoom windows; (4) Spoken interface elements as the user navigates across the screen.

"We are extremely pleased with these new products," said David Niemeijer, AssistiveWare's CTO. "Thanks to our collaboration with the Acapela Group, Mac OS X users around the world get access to the best voices ever on the Mac."

Both products are Universal Binaries and can be used on PowerPC and Intel Macs. The products include all voices available for a language of choice. Initially, the following languages will be available: US English, UK English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Swedish. For most languages male and female voices are available (certain languages include multiple male and/or female voices). The US English version includes two child voices, while all non-US English languages include one US English female voice as a bonus.

by MacNN Staff