Speech Manager Apps 94 03

Date: Fri, 1 Apr 1994 20:29:56 -0500 From: Joe Campbell <jpcampb@afterlife.ncsc.mil> Subject: Listing of Speech Manager Apps Listing of Speech Manager/MacInTalk Pro/PlainTalk Aware Applications 3/28/94 Key Words: Speech Manager MacInTalk PlainTalk Gala Tea text to speech TTS (Display in small monofont, e.g., 9pt Courier) Note: The Feb '94 Apple Developer CD has MacinTalkPro 2, but Apple has not updated their ftp site as of 24 March '94. Here are some of the Speech Manager aware text-to-speech (TTS) applications that I know of (there are more on the Apple Developer CD-ROMs). If I've missed some, please feel free to add to the list and also let me know if you disagree with my "Comments." You'll probably need to increase the memory allocations of Speech Manager aware applications if you want to use the high quality voices (I generally add a couple megabytes because the high quality voices need a lot of RAM). As for some applications (which you'll need to actually make your Mac talk), the ones I've been playing with follow. Relatively speaking, Apple's Speech Manager, with the high quality voices, has a synthesized voice quality and pronunciation that are among the best I've heard (Bellcore's Orator might do better with proper nouns). Do you agree? Has anyone done formal testing of the Speech Manager vs other TTS systems? Is there a Speech Manager aware application that allows graphical specification of pitch and rate trajectories (similar to SoundEdit's Bender, but on text or phoneme strings rather than the waveform)? The Speech Manager is available from the Internet via anonymous ftp to ftp.apple.com in /dts/mac/sys.soft/speech. There are 3 files in this directory: 6273632 Aug 14 22:51 macintalk-pro.hqx PlainTalk Text-To-Speech 1.0 speech synthesizer extension (includes Female Voice, Compressed); TTS Female Voice; TTS Male Voice; and TTS Male Voice, Compressed. Requires 68020 or better! 370108 Aug 13 04:30 speech-manager-docs.hqx Apple DocViewer format (Inside Macintosh style, no installation instructions - just drag everything onto your closed System Folder). 262569 Aug 7 07:01 speech-manager.hqx Speech Manager 1.1.1 (includes Marvin's voice) and MacInTalk Voices 1.1.1 (9 more voices). Runs most Macs. Some of the following applications require Apple's stdTTS extension (a standard dialog handler). It's also on ftp.apple.com: /dts/mac/sys.soft/quicktime/sample.code/speech-media-handler.hqx The stdTTS extension is in one of the folders you get when you expand the file "speech-media-handler.hqx". Just install it in your extensions folder and restart. Part of the Speech Manager can be purchased with At Ease 2.x (and with System 7 Pro?). Apple's work in spoken language technologies and systems is described in: Lee, Kai-Fu. "The Convers…