New British voice for Mac OS X

Acapela Group and AssistiveWare have introduced a new British English text-to-speech voice available for Infovox iVox and the quality is simply amazing. I use the Infovox iVox voices with VisioVoice to help me access my computer, and prefer the British English voices rather than the American; they are easier for this Australian to understand. My favourite until now has been the “Graham” voice, but Graham is now a distant second to the new “Peter” voice in my affections.

Part of the press report:

Acapela Group and AssistiveWare introduce new British voice for Mac OS X:
“Amsterdam – 23 August 2007 – Acapela Group and AssistiveWare today announced the brilliant new Peter text-to-speech voice that will be available as part of Infovox iVox’s British voice pack. The already available naturally sounding Graham and Lucy voices have been significantly improved as well. With these voices the Mac has never sounded so great and so British! Until the end of October the updated British voice pack is available at a 55% introductory discount.

Infovox iVox provides naturally sounding voices that work with virtually any Speech Manager compliant Mac OS X application, including Preview, TextEdit, AssistiveWare VisioVoice, ConvenienceWare GhostReader, and Adobe Acrobat. The voices also work great with the leading educational software, such as Kurzweil 3000 for Macintosh Version 3.0.4 and 4.0 and TextHelp’s Read and Write Gold for Mac version 2.1.0 and later. This means that teachers can now use this best-of-breed software with the industry leading Infovox iVox voices to enhance the learning experience of their students.

Until the end of October, Infovox iVox with British voices is available for 99 euro/USD excluding tax and includes the high quality British voices Peter, Lucy and Graham as well as the high quality Heather US English voice as a bonus (this constitutes a 55% discount on the regular price and a 34% discount on the ‘Give Your Mac a Voice Promotion’ prices). The British Infovox iVox is also available as a discounted bundle with GhostReader for 109 euro/USD. For prices for other languages as well as for school and classroom licenses, see the AssistiveWare web site. The updated British voice pack is a free update for existing users.”

(Via AssistiveWare News.)

I should tell you that I use, and beta test, both VisioVoice and KeyStrokes from AssistiveWare as well as using the Infovox iVox voices. I want to also tell you that I don’t say they’re great because I test them, I test them because they are great and I love being just a little involved in that.

- Ricky Buchanan