Apple announces new "Spoken Interface" technology
updated 07:15 pm EST, Tue March 16, 2004
Apple\'s \"Spoken Interface\"
Apple announced new , which it says will help it develop the technology, which will be included in Mac OS X 10.4.
Apple announced new , which it says will help it develop the technology, which will be included in Mac OS X 10.4.
Comments
It's nice to see Apple reinvesting their time into the technologies they pushed aside a few years back. Now that Apple is more stable, the time is, um, ripe to dabble is areas like this.
Dear Steve,
You rock. Keep up the awesome job.
It's about time... I've been looking forward to Apple embracing text-to-speech technology for years! (Think about it: they could easily sell any old book online, and have your Mac automatically turn them into audiobooks. This would be a boon to the early education market and the handicapped. Even sync the audio to the iPod! No more need to hire narrators, and the download would be tiny. Call the new app "iBrary" and usher in a new era of publishing. )
Now I really hope Apple retires those voices from 1988 already. They're downright embarrassing and barely recognizable.
Just check out AT&T Labs' demo to see a sampling of how far speech synthesis has come in the last 10 years:
http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos
I really hope Apple overhauls this area of our OS. The available voices haven't changed since OS 7.x days!
Wow -- I just gave a listen to http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos
...and I'm amazed. Those voices make the Apple "voices" sound like a bad sci fi flick with crappy production values. I really hope Apple is cooking up some new voices to go with this new technology.
I think the "Mike" voice sounds better than the "Crystal" one -- it's less choppy and flows more naturally. For the first sentence or two I almost forgot it was a computer generated voice.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
Hey now, let's knock the voices... You know, they have made alot of cameo appearences in songs like Benny Benassi's - Satisfaction. "Push me, and then just touch me...
Just kidding, let's bring on the AT&T voices!
After trying a few random sentences, I found the Crystal voice to be more natural most of the time. The U.K. English version was really bad. It must be harder for programmers to get the british accent right. The female voice was also better than the male one in this case.
In Apple's defense, the text-to-speech capabilities is roughly a decade old and I doubt there was many resources to further its development since then.
Finally overhaul the Speech Recognition engine. C'MON APPLE! :-)
http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html
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Senior User
Joined: Apr 2001
voices
This is great, but it looks like we are still stuck with the old voices. Would be nice if Apple put some work in to improving the voice quality.