ATMac

Text to speech involves computer generated speech - the computer reading to you. This category is used for all text to speech applications except VoiceOver - which has its own category.

Did you know that you can change narrators automatically when you’re using GhostReader? It’s an undocumented feature, and only works with the voices from Infovox iVox or ConvenienceWare, but I’ve confirmed that it does work.

Yesterday marked the first public release of Olearia - a free and open source DAISY digital talking book player for Mac OS X. Olearia is still in beta release, but is fully compatible with VoiceOver and plays DAISY 2.02 and DAISY/NISO 2005 audio or text+audio talking books. Future versions will also play text-only DAISY books and many other features are planned.

The Laboratory for Understanding Collaborative Technology at Northwestern University is working on a project to build and evaluate new original technologies for users with disabilities. They are currently recruiting subjects with a variety of impairments (cognitive, sensory or motor) from the Chicago area.

Dejal Narrator is a text to speech toold which allows you to set with different voices for different sections of text. It allows for multiple chapters in each document to help organize the story, uses a word replacement dictionary to fine-tune the pronunciation, and can export the story to a sound file or direct to iTunes.

Have you ever wanted to make phone calls on the net using a synthetic computer generated voice? If you’re an AAC user, then this is a great way to communicate with people remotely. This article will show you how to set up Wiretap Anywhere to send your speech voice to Skype’s internet phone system.

Cepstral has released version 5 of its text to speech voices, announcing improved voice quality and engine efficiency.

There’s a new version of the Growl notification system available. What is Growl anyway, and why might you want to use it?

Did you know that there is a very simple way to get your Mac to speak pretty much any piece of text?

It’s easy to confuse “speech to text” and “text to speech” - they’re very similar phrases - but the differences are important. Knowing which is which will help you search for what you really need.

An application “needing attention”, in Apple’s language, is one that’s waiting for you to tell it something before it can keep going and isn’t the app you’re currently working with. Here’s how to set things up so the computer will use the system voice to tell you that an alert is being displayed.