Great news for all users of text-to-speech technology, with the low prices for Infovox iVox voices being extended permanently. The “Peter” British English voice is still the best text-to-speech voice I have heard to date. I wish they would bring out a Russian voice though – I’m learning Russian and it would help a lot with the pronounciation!
Amsterdam – 15 October 2007 – Acapela Group and AssistiveWare today announced that based on the overwhelming response on the Give Your Mac a Voice Promotion, Acapela Group has decided to permanently lower the price of the Infovox iVox voices, which can be used with virtually any speech using application on Mac OS X. Originally introduced as a solution for the low volume accessibility market, it was found that also many educators and consumers wanted to use these naturally sounding voices to listen to documents, create personal podcasts and to help struggling readers. With the new prices the best voices ever on the Mac are now within reach of educators, students, people with disabilities as well as any other Mac user who likes to hear his Macintosh speak.
With the imminent introduction of Mac OS X Leopard, with its enhanced support for third-party add-on speech synthesizers, more people then ever will be able to enjoy the benefits of the natural-sounding Infovox iVox voices as Acapela Group will be able to introduce voices for even more languages. Voices are already available for the following languages: American English, British English, Finnish, French, Canadian French, German, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, American Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian and Swedish. All of these voices are Universal Binary and compatible with Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher (including Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard).
The Infovox iVox voices, once installed on the computer, appear in the Speech panel of the System Preferences and can be used by any application that has speech functionality, including Preview, TextEdit, Mail, VoiceOver, Microsoft Word (through its Speech toolbar), VisioVoice, Proloquo, GhostReader, Acrobat, AppleScript, Kurzweil 3000 for Macintosh (version 3.0.4. and higher), TextHelp Read and Write Gold for Mac (version 2.1 and higher) and many others.
Infovox iVox voices are sold per language with each language consisting of one or more male and/or female voices. All languages contain the American English Heather voice as a bonus. Starting today, all languages except the Scandinavian ones are available for a suggested retail price of US$ 99 in North America and 99 Euro excluding VAT everywhere else. This is for the first language. Additional language packs are available for a suggested retail price of US$ 49.50 in North America and 49.50 Euro excluding VAT everywhere else. Scandinavian languages are available for a suggested retail price of 219 euro excluding VAT and as an additional language for 109.50 euro excluding VAT. Multi-user and educational classroom and school licenses are also available for Infovox iVox.
Infovox iVox is also available bundled with AssistiveWare and ConvenienceWare products. For educators, students and anyone else who wants to get the most out of the excellent voices, Infovox iVox is available as a bundle with GhostReader, the selection and document reader with iPod export, for 109 Euro/US$. For Mac users with vision impairments, Infovox iVox is included with VisioVoice for 249 Euro/US$ excluding VAT. For people who cannot speak, Infovox iVox is now included with Proloquo for 249 Euro / 299 US$.
Read the full press release.
- Ricky Buchanan
(Via AssistiveWare News.)
Responses to "Lower Prices For Infovox iVox Voices"
Changing Narrators With Ghostreader or Infovox iVox Voices April 13, 2012 at 7:17 pm
[...] 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 [...]