Text-to-speech, or speech synthesis, has been around for a long, long time. Every Mac, since the very first one, has had speech synthesis built right in (AppleTalk voices were a bit clunky back in the days) and on the Windows platform it was already available right out of the box with Microsoft Narrator in the early 1990s!
Over the last two decades we have seen it evolve greatly to become one of the most commonly used accessibility features on computers around the world allowing people with impaired vision to hear content read aloud by a computer-generated voice using text input such as a document.
Speech recognition on the other hand is more recent and had quite a turbulent history – starting with the “natural language processing” experiments at IBM Watson Labs where algorithms studied audio recordings and struggled to understand what was said to them by humans eventually leading to a series of decisions that relegated the technologies behind speech recognition in big enterprise solutions and as a cool demo for developers. Fast forward to today and the state of the art of voice recognition is clearly getting better all the time but still far from mature for desktop usage.
To get a sense of this, bring up Terminal (it’s in Applications > Utilities) and type:
say “I read the Loop every day, and now my teeth are the color of the winter sun”
Hit return, and you’ll hear your Mac’s computer voice, in all its default glory. Now open System Preferences and select the Dictation & Speech icon. Fiddle with some of those options and click the Play button to try them out. Now if you go back to Terminal, your new settings will be reflected when you ask it to say something.
In addition, you may also consider using text to voice software if you want to improve your brand while saving time and money; you may visit the WellSaid Labs homepage to learn more about this software.
Now that you see what comes built in, click the headline link and give this demo a try. There’s something about having an avatar, and the quality of the voices are great. Remember, no curse words. Oh, OK, go ahead. So much fun!