Re: TTS for different languages?
Re: TTS for different languages?
- Subject: Re: TTS for different languages?
- From: Matt Budd (Madentec) <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 09:42:32 -0700
Okay, so after doing a bit of digging, I was able to only find one
third party company that provided (supported) International TTS for OS
X.
The company is called Acapela Group (http://www.acapela-group.com), and
although you wouldn't know it from their website, they develop two
speech engines, called Sayso and BrightSpeech. It also seems like they
are planning on merging the two technologies/voices into one package.
This company is also a merged result of the the Babel Technologies
company, and their product (BrightSpeech) is probably a renamed version
of Telia Infovox. So in the end, what it will come down to, is that
Sayso, BrightSpeech, Telia Infovox, Babel, and Acapela will all refer
to the same thing provided by one company (this was half the battle
trying to figure out what products/companies referred to what).
The good news is that this this TTS solution is supported for OSX. They
have a proprietary set of voices (good natural sounding voices) that
you can access via a proprietary set of APIs. They have also developed
a plug-in (it resides in /System/Library/Speech/Synthesizers) so that
their voices can be used through the Speech Synthesis Manager (aka
Speech Manager) APIs. This is really great as then our applications
only have to use the SM-APIs to access not only Apple's Voices but
these guys' 3rd-party voices. The only problem with these voices is
that they are in English, French, Italian, German, Polish, and Spanish
only (for our requirements, they are missing Portuguese and Japanese).
My question echoes Saqib's question then. Is this API public? We want
to encourage other TTS-engine providers to also provide similar
plug-ins when they port their engines to OS X. Or alternatively, if we
have a 3rd-party TTS-engine with only a proprietary API, can we code
ourselves a bridge to the SM-API?
For example, we have licenses for ViaVoice 6. This TTS-Engine is
Windows or Linux only, but we might be able to port the Linux to OS X.
When we do though, we'd like to also create a SM-API plug in (similiar
to Acapela's) so these ViaVoice voices are available through the same
means as the regular Apple voices. Ideally IBM (who makes the ViaVoice
TTS) would be the ones creating this plugin, but we might be able to in
their stead?
- Matt
On Oct 28, 2004, at 4:14 PM, Matt Budd (Madentec) wrote:
Hello all,
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 am interested in using TTS for my application, but are there any
international voices out there that will work with the Speech Manager
API (i.e. can be selectable in the Speech System Pref Pane)? I would
need them to recognize/understand international text that is French,
Spanish, UK English, German, Italian, Japanese, and/or Portuguese?
Would these voices (if they exist) be ones Apple provides or 3rd
parties?
Another possible solution would be for us to license a 3rd-party TTS
engine that would have these international voices.
Any info or a direction in which to look would be helpful and
appreciated.
Thanks,
Matt
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