Talking Browser\for vision impaired

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by snowman, Apr 30, 2002.

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  1. Jooske

    Jooske Registered Member

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    Feb 12, 2002
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    Netherlands, EU near the sea
    there's a lot going on in speech country. I found out L&H who are the specialists since long for speech engines (tts) and all in that area had to sell their company. http://www.scansoft.com/realspeak/pcmm/ is the company that bought it.
    So in fact i would advice as long as those tts engines are available for free on the MS pages do grab them, as from the descriptions it's not quite clear to me if they will still be available at all or that we are to buy a complete suite with the whole lot and additional software we might never like and for prices around $200 and more.
    That part they use still works with the SAPI 4 engines, which is used in TDS and for the MSAgents, and is not exchangeble with the SAPI 5 which among others is included in XP.
    This moment i am using TextAloudMp3 which enables you to read any text or web page aloud and save that either as a wave or mp3 or a normal file. this program is not free.
    There are so many page readers like this and with MASH or some own scripting you can make an msagent read the pages for you. In most cases you copy the wanted text to the clipboard which is read then, but there are other ways as well, like the software you mentioned here.
    For the agents characters i have the impression the developers are more working on the live actors which are more a graphical kind, difficult to explain and used a lot like the news readers on your tv (like in www.talkie.com) most of time interactive and intelligent reacting on your keywords spoken or typed. Cartouche has fine ones and so there are more on the web.
    That Dragon Natural speech.. the name says it already, natural, not much training needed i guess, while the older SAPI 4 for voice recognition needed lots of training to work with you and understand you.  
    Not sure of those new generations of avatars if they work with SAPI 5 or other technology as well, don't have the software on my system yet.
    The pages here i had read with this talk thing to hear how it sounds. Those tools are used about in the same way as the readers for vision disabled persons.
     
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