Text To Speech Voices

[Felasco]

Hi there MacGods,

I was hoping you might know if the built-in voices used for text to speech have been up upgraded since Yosemite. Is Apple still working on that feature?

Thanks!

 

[pm-r]

Hi there MacGods,

I was hoping you might know if the built-in voices used for text to speech have been up upgraded since Yosemite. Is Apple still working on that feature?

Thanks!

No doubt they are still working on their voices excetera, especially with Siri now being available, but even with the default voices going back to Mountain Lion era, not all the available voices were always installed.

You can check here:

Many of these incredible voices are not installed by default on a Mac! Thankfully that’s easy to change, and we’ll show you exactly how to add new voices to the Mac.

How to Add New Voices to Mac OS X

By the way, what did you have in mind???

Say with Different Voices
OS X comes with more than 20 voices pre-installed and ready at your disposal. Here’s a list of what’s available as of Mountain Lion:

Female Voices
- Agnes
- Kathy
- Princess
- Vicki
- Victoria

Male Voices
- Alex
- Bruce
- Fred
- Junior
- Ralph

Novelty Voices
- Albert
- Bad News
- Bahh
- Bells
- Boing
- Bubbles
- Cellos
- Deranged
- Good News
- Hysterical
- Pipe Organ
- Trinoids
- Whisper
- Zarvox

say -v "voice name" "text to say"

Terminal 101: Making your Mac talk with “say” | TechRadar

For help or suggestions with Mac and third party speech voices have a look here etc:
mac third party speech voices - Google Search


EDIT: BTW, I used to fiddle arouund with the various Mac voices, and in my Mavericks volume, /System/Library/Speech/Voices it seems I have some 62 different voices, and some I must admit sure have some strange names so I don't know how useful they would be. It's been quite a while since I used that stuff..



- Patrick
======

 

[Felasco]

Thanks for the replies above. So I did some research. Best I can tell Mac voices have not dramatically improved in recent years, but there are some third party voices that seem better than what comes with OSX.

I found this interesting, and will probably buy it. You can hear some voice samples here.

Infovox iVox - AssistiveWare

Also, this company sells a product which allows you to edit voices word by word using tags.

GhostReader : easy to use Text-to-Speech for Mac | ConvenienceWare

This PDF explains how it works.

https://download.assistiveware.com/ghostreader/files/ghostreader-plus-tags-manual-v0.pdf

Simple explanation, you can edit voice selection, volume and speed on a word by word or global basis.

As example, you could create a conversation by using a male voice for some sentences and a female voice for other sentences. Then you can tweak volume and speed of the words to make it sound somewhat more real, a bit less robotic.