Speech Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

AppleScripting Mail > Announce New Emails By Voice

by Ben Waldie (Mar 25th, 2013)

You're in the kitchen cooking dinner, or sitting down watching TV, or exercising. Ding! You have a new email. Quickly, run to your Mac to see who it's from. Meh, spam. Ding! Meh, a message from your boss. Ding! Meh. Sure would be nice if Mail could announce who's emailing you. That way, you could ...

Mountain Lion 101: Updated high-quality voice synthesis

by Michael Rose (Jul 28th, 2012)

Most of the speech hubbub around Mountain Lion has centered on the OS's marquee Dictation feature, which happily accepts your spoken words as a substitute for typing them in. Dictation works in almost any text entry field, and it's surprisingly effective; Steve even dictated his entire post about ...

Next generation iPad adds voice dictation

by Dave Caolo (Mar 7th, 2012)

Earlier today at the iPad media event, Phil Schiller announced that the new iPad will feature voice dictation. Users will find a new microphone button on the keyboard. Give it a tap and start speaking, much like you do with the iPhone 4S. As of the announcement, voice dictation on the new iPad ...

Will Dragon speech apps remain in the app store for iPhone 4 owners?

by Mel Martin (Oct 5th, 2011)

It was a bit of a shock to learn yesterday that the terrific Siri app, now owned by Apple, will get pulled from the app store. It's being done, I'm sure, to encourage people to get the Siri technology built into the new iPhone 4S. Although an interview with the co-founder of Siri indicated that ...

Dragon Go for iPhone gets smarter

by Mel Martin (Sep 29th, 2011)

Dragon Go!, the all-purpose voice recognition search app from Nuance, is getting a significant upgrade today. In fact, it's almost a preview of some of the functionality we suspect will be in iOS5. The free app lets you speak conversationally with your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. Say things ...

Ukranian Defense Chief seemingly plagiarizes Steve Jobs' graduation speech

by Kelly Hodgkins (Aug 3rd, 2011)

Raisa Bogatyrev, the Ukrainian Secretary of National Security and Defense, is causing a stir with her recent graduation speech at Kiev-Mohyla Academy. According to transcripts, her speech was eerily similar to a commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs to the 2005 graduating class at ...

OS X Lion introduces new, multilingual, high-quality text-to-speech voices

by Chris Rawson (Jul 24th, 2011)

First announced in March, then found in developer previews, one of the little-heralded new features of OS X Lion is its inclusion of several high-quality text-to-speech voices in 22 different languages. The last major addition to Apple's built-in OS X voices was Alex, a higher-quality voice ...

Why didn't we see a Nuance announcement during WWDC?

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jun 7th, 2011)

One major rumor missing from the WWDC keynote yesterday was voice control. It was just last year that Apple purchased Siri, a popular voice companion app for iOS. Apple was also rumored to be working with Nuance to offer some form of voice control in its software. References to Nuance were ...

Apple-Nuance deal may take root in NC datacenter

by Michael Rose (May 9th, 2011)

The stars appear to have aligned for the rumored Apple-Nuance deal, according to TechCrunch. The suggested strategic partnership between the Cupertino tech giant and the Burlington, MA speech-savvy software firm may find its first expression in Apple's new North Carolina data center, per the ...

Voice Brief for iPhone is updated with some welcome new features

by Mel Martin (May 4th, 2011)

I first reviewed Voice Brief in March. The app uses a synthesized voice to read your email, Twitter feed, Facebook, the current weather, stock prices you follow and some RSS feeds that you choose. I liked the app and said it had great potential but needed some updated features. Today it has ...

Will iOS 5 get integrated voice tech?

by Mel Martin (Mar 29th, 2011)

TechCrunch is reporting the rumor today, and some sources I have close to the Siri product think it is likely happening. Siri is that very cool personal assistant app. It allows you to ask questions that the app sends (as your voice data) to a server where it is recognized. The query is then ...

VerbalVictor app gives a voice to those who can't speak

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 29th, 2010)

Created by a caring father and his students at Wake Forest University, VerbalVictor is an interactive communication tool for people who are unable to speak. The application was developed by Paul Pauca for his five-year old son, Victor, who has difficulty talking due to a rare genetic disorder that ...

MacTech 2010: Andy Ihnatko on the coming of Lion

by Mike Schramm (Nov 3rd, 2010)

Commentator Andy Ihnatko took the stage at this week's MacTech conference here in Los Angeles today to give the conference keynote. In his talk, Ihnatko spoke about the upcoming new version of OS X, Lion, and specifically three different features of it. First, he talked about the Mac App Store, and ...

360iDev: Mike Lee on changing the world with engineering

by Mike Schramm (Apr 15th, 2010)

Former Delicious Monster and Tapulous developer Mike Lee (who now works for the mothership at Apple) took the stage to start off the last day of 360iDev in San Jose. He gave a wildly rambling speech about what it means to be an engineer and why programmers should not only make the best programs ...

Let your Mac take dictation

by Mel Martin (May 22nd, 2009)

MacSpeech Dictate has now been upgraded to version 1.5, giving the application more accuracy and a new vocabulary editor. The update also includes a new English profile option, allowing you to indicate if your speech has North American, Southern North American, or a Latino North American accent. The ...