We are talking about the ViaVoice for OS X (referred to as VVOSX) that
is distributed by ScanSoft (http://www.scansoft.com/viavoice/osx/). A
couple of issues with this:
- VVOSX is Dictation Software with added TTS support built in (that
happens to be the ViaVoice TTS, not Apple's TTS). We'd be looking to
use a portion of the software that isn't its main purpose and perhaps
not fully tested enough to be separated.
- We also want to license this to our customers. Currently VVOSX is
~$130US and I don't believe (I could be wrong on this though) that IBM
sells only that portion (TTS) separately (and for a lot less money).
It's kind of bad to make our customers pay $130US more to have software
they don't want just so they can get the ViaVoice voices (which maybe
would license for ~30% (estimate) of that cost by themselves).
- VVOSX can only speak to you in US English and UK English...might as
well stick with Apple's voice selection (which we get it for free) if
that's all they offer. I was trying to port ViaVoice TTS for
Windows/Linux since that supports all the languages we're interested in
(English (US & UK), French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and
Japanese).
- VVOSX is only supported on Jaguar. It is not supported to run on
Panther or Tiger. That might be because of the recognition stuff, but
my bet is that since Apple beefed up the Speakable Items and TTS for
Panther+, they might have stopped working on this product (I don't
really know, but that's the sense I got).
It seems like to me that IBM did a bit of work to port their ViaVoice
TTS engine over to OS X, but didn't finish the job and most likely
won't (IMHO).
- Matt
On Nov 10, 2004, at 5:57 PM, Andrew Begel wrote:
If you buy ViaVoice for OSX, you'll get the text-to-speech component
in dylib format, and you'll be able to program whatever you like on
it. The API to the speech engine is likely the same or very similar as
ViaVoice on Linux.
Andrew
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