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New in OS X Lion: Dozens of new Speech voices

29 April 2011 3,012 views One Comment

The Mac has always excelled at speech synthesis — it’s been in there since the very first Mac shipped back in 1984. In the release of Apple’s next-generation desktop operating system, the company is giving this under appreciated feature a quantum boost.

With addition of scores of voices and regional dialects across more than two dozen languages, your Mac is about to get schooled. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion offers the 10 standard voices, including long-time favorite “Fred,” but Apple will offer users the ability to download up to 60-plus more for a total of 77 voices.

Save up to 80% on Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 StudentHigh quality multilingual speech voices: In Lion, Apple has added dozens of new high quality voices in more than 40 languages and dialectsWikipedia

Languages, dialects include: English (US, UK, South Africa, Ireland, Scottish, Australia, India), Arabic (Saudi), Chinese (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch (Netherlands, Belgium), Finnish, French (France, Canada), German, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korea, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese (Portugal, Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Spain, Mexico), Swedish, Thai & Turkish

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Before you start counting dialects and accents, OS X Lion will deliver 25 languages when it ships this Summer.

Whereas Speech is great for having the news read to you, i.e. NetNewsWire works well, this feature doesn’t (yet) work with Amazon’s Kindle app, which would be very, very sweet indeed.

Gotten your fingers into Mac OS X 10.7 Lion? Share an anecdote and, if possible, a link in the comments below…

via AppleInsider

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