Re: TTS for different languages?
Re: TTS for different languages?
- Subject: Re: TTS for different languages?
- From: Daniel Ström <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 21:18:05 +0100
Actually Telia (the swedish phone company) developed a product called
Telia Infovox, but it was sold a couple of years ago to a company in
Belgium called Babel Technologies http://www.babeltech.com/
They have TTS for a couple of languages, and they're based on Apples
MacinTalk (The speech technology for the Mac). The last time I read
about their TTS plugins, they weren't updated for OS X. I just took a
peek at their site, and it still seems like it's only for Classic Mac
OS (up to Mac OS 9.x).
I have filed a bug report rdar:// 3648150 with Apple, stating that they
should release documentation for how to localize TTS for other regions
in the world.
For Tiger Apple will update their TTS, to include screen reader
functionality. They do this because american laws (Americans with
Diasbilities Act) says that schools and authorities can't buy
computers, for which there is no support for such functionalities. The
only company that had an implementation for screen reading product for
the Mac, discontinued their product. So Apple had to implement this on
its own.
There are similar laws coming within the European Communities, so if
Apple wants to sell computers to schools and so on here, they must
support screen reading in other languages.
At least they must provide us developers with appropriate documentation
and possibly tool for creating voice files and speech dictionaries in a
compatible format.
I am a hobbyist programmer and can't afford to license the plugins from
Babel Technologies, so I want to do my own implementation, but Apple
hasn't released the documentation for every ADC member. But there has
to be some documentation, otherwise Telia wouldn't have done the
Infovox product.
That is what my bug report is about. Also Apple earlier said that the
TTS and Speech Recognition was for the vision impaired or blind.
In my bug report I stated that there are quite many more people that
would have benefits from speech technologies (ie dyslectics and people
with other learning disabilities). Apple have since updated the info
about Spoken Interface to include the new info. I don't know if they
did it because of what I wrote, or if they had got information from
another source.
My bug report was filed in early May this year, and it's still in the
"Open/Analyze" stage.
I hope that more of you will file bug reports on this matter, since the
more developers that need this documentation, the more likely is it
that Apple will release it. You can file a bug report even if you don't
need to localize the TTS, but only want to make your own voices. You
will need documentation anyway.
Best regards
Daniel Strom
2004-10-31 kl. 01.24 skrev M. Uli Kusterer:
At 16:14 Uhr -0600 28.10.2004, Matt Budd (Madentec) wrote:
I am just looking into using TTS for the Macintosh. I've done a bit
of research, and it appears that OS X only ships with 22 North
American English voices.
(...)
I would need them to recognize/understand international text that is
French, Spanish, UK English, German, Italian, Japanese, and/or
Portuguese?
So, do you want TTS, or speech recognition?
There's a company called Telia or InfoVox, who have some other
languages as TTS voices available. Not sure they've been ported to
MacOS X, though.
There's also the open-source MBROLA project, but that doesn't show up
in Apple's Text-To-Speech voices list.
I don't think there's anything for speech recognition. Have you
checked whether IBM's ViaVoice is available in the languages you want?
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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