Dejal Narrator - Text to speech with easy voice changes

By Ricky Buchanan • October 3, 2008

We’ve already seen that you can use OS X’s built in text-to-speech just by selecting a key combination to use with it, so why pay money for Narrator? There is one feature that Narrator has that no other text-to-speech software has - easy in-line voice switching. You set a marker and it changes to the selected voice at that point while reading.

Use Narrator to read out a play or story with different voices for each of the parts. It uses speech synthesis to read out marked passages using specified voice attributes. You can choose different voices, rates, pitches, inflections, and volumes for each character in the story. The words are highlighted on-screen, and there are also a couple of silent read-along options for stage directions, or for you to read out your own parts.

Starting with version 2, you can have multiple chapters in each document to help organize the story, use a word replacement dictionary to fine-tune the pronunciation, and can export the story as an AAC sound file or export it to iTunes, so you can listen on an iPod or iPhone, just like your own audiobook! Plus many other appearance and functionality improvements.

In my testing I found that Narrator has some trouble with Infovox iVox voices - the highlighting of words as they are spoken breaks down if it reaches a section set to use an iVox voice and doesn’t always get back in synchronisation afterwards, and the “pitch” and “inflection” sliders slide around but don’t do anything. To my knowledge, none of the Infovox iVox voices can have their pitch or inflection altered, so the sliders shouldn’t be available for these voices. These problems didn’t happen with the Apple or Cepstral voices that I tried, but the Cepstral voices are generally of a lower quality than the Infovox iVox voices so I found it disappointing that these didn’t work. Perhaps this will be fixed in a future version.

Website: Dejal Narrator

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac

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Categories: Neurologically Impaired, Text to Speech, Users
Tags: apple, change voice, computer voice, free trial, mac, mac voice, multiple voices, os x, shareware, speak text, speech synthesizer, text speak, Text to Speech, tts, voice output, voices for mac

About the Author

Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan is 34 years old and the founder and main writer for ATMac. She's bedridden with severe CFS/ME or perhaps a primary mitochondrial disorder - the doctors are not sure. When she's not working on ATMac or her other websites she composes music, listens to audio books, does other disability advocacy, watches TV with her flatmate, and enjoys her cat.

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