Re: TTS for different languages?
Re: TTS for different languages?
- Subject: Re: TTS for different languages?
- From: David Niemeijer <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 20:42:14 +0100
Matt,
At 9:42 AM -0700 4/11/04, Matt Budd (Madentec) wrote:
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.
Sounds like you overlooked my reply on 29 October to you and the list
that mentioned Acapela as the current only source of OS X compatible
TTS :-)
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).
Two remarks:
1) They have more languages, including Portuguese (but no Japanese),
and as I offered before I can put you in touch with the right person
there, who can provide you all the details. Just let me know off-list
(same for of course anyone else interested; I don't want to post
other people's email addresses on a public list).
2) Their Speech Manager support is still very young and not complete
so you might (or might not) still run in some issues there. Their own
API seems to be pretty stable now.
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?
Sounds like a great idea (but might be quite a bit of work if you do
not have access to the source code), and of course you would need the
permission of the original providers.
david.
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