Re: text-to-speech problems, or is it just me?
Re: text-to-speech problems, or is it just me?
- Subject: Re: text-to-speech problems, or is it just me?
- From: Chilton Webb <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 07:35:44 -0600
On Tuesday, February 26, 2002, at 06:53 AM, Lance Bland wrote:
(a) is it ready from a technology perspective? - apparently not yet.
Until this little mishap, it's functioned in a far superior capacity to
anything I've seen on other platforms. One client of mine, a company who
built computer systems for the blind or handicapped, bought a TTS system
that I believe cost them about $125,000 per license. It was supposed to
be the most human voice system ever developed. This was in 1996. The
funny thing is, when I started working with them, I made an audio clip
of the 'Bruce' voice in Apple's TTS, and out of their 9 employees, only
1 could discern it from the other one as the 'cheap' voice, the other 8
were sure Bruce was the higher quality voice. I agreed, Bruce sounded
much better. Of course, the other one ran on Dells, and at the time
Apple was being notoriously quiet about their TTS technology.
(b) If we embed it into our product will it make our apps bomb out, or
will only speech not work right? (in your experience of course).
I have never seen any serious problems arising from it. In fact, it's so
stable I have repeatedly used it for debugging purposes, as the TTS
engine will often continue to fire off words even after an app crashed
in OS9. So if I was doing something in a code resource, for example,
where the CodeWarrior debugger was scared to go, I'd have it rattle off
the current function names, etc., then when it died, I'd listen for it
to stop and go look at the last line that it mentioned.
I use TTS every day, mainly because I'm interested in disability
solutions for some of my friends. I personally believe it is the best
example of Apple technology done right. It never fails to work for me,
and the insanely small amount of code necessary to implement it makes it
a no-brainer. I just wish more developers would think about how to
implement it better.
(b) what are the licensing issues, if any? Does it look like Apple is
committed to it?
There are no licensing issues with it unless you want to ship one of the
language variants, like Spanish, or if you wanted to bundle it with your
app. But you shouldn't have to, it's installed by default on every Mac
for as far back as I can recall (back to its inception in the early 90s).
(c) since I have no experience with it can you please give me a basic
pointer to some documentation or a pointer to an example application
exhibiting how it works?
Look for TTS in the documentation. That stands for Text To Speech.
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Carbon/multimedia/SpeechSynthesisManager/
Speech_Synthesis_Manager/index.html
-Chilton
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