Filed under: Leopard
24 Hours of Leopard: "Alex," the new voice of Mac OS X
Feature: Alex, the new voice of Mac OS XHow it works: Voice synthesis on the Mac has been around for more than 20 years now, but outside of screenreading and special applications it's never been a marquee feature (that is, if you don't count Talking Moose -- now once again available for OS X. Woot!). Even though the Macintalk and Speech Manager voices have improved a lot over time, the best of them still sound distressingly artificial.
Enter Alex, a dramatically more comprehensible voice (YouTube demo movie) that includes fine breath and pause control to enhance understandability, especially for high-speed reading; you can listen to a sample of Alex at this post. From the samples of Alex that I've heard, he compares favorably with high-end synthesis voices like AT&T's Natural Voice and Cepstral. For anyone using VoiceOver or wanting to be able to track information while not watching the computer, Alex is a natural.
Who will use it: VoiceOver users, who'll be thrilled; all Leopard owners who occasionally need things read instead of displayed.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Rhywun said 10:14AM on 10-26-2007
I read somewhere that "Alex" is replacing all the other voices. I hope not because I love "Zarvox"--sometimes I set it to read me the time on the quarter-hour. Guests love it...
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Joseph said 10:23AM on 10-26-2007
Why is the picture referring to time machine? Did Erica crop that picture with terminal?
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greenlight said 10:33AM on 10-26-2007
Joseph: Obviously it's a reference to the talking moose being retro, hence going back in time, like in a time machine. It's called a joke.
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Joseph said 10:55AM on 10-26-2007
Yeah but it's cropped horribly and makes no sense. It's called graphic design.
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Nate said 11:15AM on 10-26-2007
This "24 hour hours of leopard" is a lame excuse to try and increase your site's traffic. One well written article on leopard would have been far superior. As such, the signal-to-noise ratio on your RSS feed just dropped below my threshold and I'm unsubscribing. Thought you might be interested to know.
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Gene Cowan said 11:26AM on 10-26-2007
Amazing... TUAW is like a petri dish for those sociologists studying the decline in manners brought on by blogs and the ease of commenting.
The only place I've seen more bile directed at blog entries is political blogs.
By all means, if you think entries here are lame, please do us all a favor and stop visiting/reading the feed. Some of us enjoy little snippets like this a few times a day, it is like a conversation with a friend -- it's not the New York Times.
And if you think that Erica Sadun and the other writers here are hacks, poor designers, atrocious writers... well then, you are of course free to start your very own Apple-related blog, where you can write glowing prose as befits the subject.
And then wait for the inevitable crass and insulting comments to pour in.
If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.
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Andrew said 11:47AM on 10-26-2007
Bye Nate! Don't let the door hit you on the way out!
TUAW, keep up the good work. This is excellent stuff.
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Michael Rose said 12:01PM on 10-26-2007
Joseph &c. -- regarding the graphic, well, it was late and I was tired, could not think of a good way to illustrate a voice. Hence, the Moose by the Universal Access icon. The Time Machine copy just happened to fall above UA on the 300+ features page, a coincidence (but a funny one nonetheless).
Please don't blame Erica for my graphic design (non)skills.
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Sean Flanagan said 12:40PM on 10-26-2007
I don't know... Alex sounds a little like a Dane Cook Speak n' Spell bit... AT&T is still a little further ahead than Apple on text-to-speech to be honest. They're especially ahead with their "Mike" voice, which I have heard over many an automated telephone system.
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superdg.com said 1:15PM on 10-26-2007
#6: Hear, hear.
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mark said 1:25PM on 10-26-2007
i guess nate (#5) would have preferred one, long TUAW post, where readers would all be commenting upon all 300+ new features at the end of a singular article.
that said, re: the new alex voice: i'm not impressed. but i'm sure we'll get there, eventually!
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Fritz Laurel said 4:24PM on 10-26-2007
I used to LOVE the talking moose! That came out for, what ... system 6?
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Just Me said 6:25PM on 10-26-2007
How about those that like to convert rtf, txt, pdfs to audio and then listen to it on our iPods... Love it :-)
Although my reading, writing, grammar and spelling skills are suffering!!
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Simon Arch said 7:56PM on 10-26-2007
@nate: "Thought you might be interested to know."
You thought wrong, boyo.
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