Comments on: On my monoglot Macintosh…

By: aqueelah

aqueelah — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 19:48:44 +0000

ear mail can speak japanese, and speaks it well, but it is an app made just to turn your text emails into audio files and put them into itunes or your ipod, if someone could disect the awesome speak module that is in this app and apply it system wide or at least to text editors or web browsers it would solve half the problem

here is the link to ear mail if any one wants to take a stab at it

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ipod_itunes/earmail.html

By: David

David — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 15:42:00 +0000

While it is not exactly a Japanese VoiceOver, and not even speaks Japanese, the Proloquo software I developed includes very high quality voices in a language of choice (including French and other European languages) and offers many features for low-vision (not blind) users. It requires Mac OS X 10.3 and higher

By: Trouble

Trouble — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 15:11:09 +0000

…i just discovered speech synthesis this morning and am completely thrilled by it. i’m one of those audio-centered persons, vastly prefering to listen than to read. however, being an academic and having to read latin, french, spanish, etc. fairly often, I immediately tried out the speech synthesis on a french news site and the results were, as Gareth has indicated, pretty much worthless. Ditto for spanish, latin, etc. It cannot be denied that the speech synthesizer is a real godsend; but it would be even more divine if we could at least have 2 or 3 (or 5 or 6) other languages. how hard could it be?…

By: Cory

Cory — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 04:16:26 +0000

I’m left in an interesting quandry myself. You see, I do not see. I am a visually impaired college student, and I am going to be going to school in Tokyo for the coming year. Currently I use a WinXP machine, with a screen magnifier, and a screen reader. The screen reader is completely capable of handling Japanese, all hiragan, and kattakana, and most kanzi that it encounters. It read through asahi.com fairly easily. The voice synthesizer is an out of license Japanese synthesizer from IBM under the Viavoice brand. The first step for apple is not necisarily getting the voice its getting the engine to process all 3 of the alphabets fluidly. With that I am left to make a decision, I am purchasing an lighter notebook than my 8 lb beast. I would desperately like to go with a mac. But, I need something that can read Japanese text to me. So as with the rest, I anxiously await.

By: Gareth Potter

Gareth Potter — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:07:21 +0000

eps,
I can’t see that _that_ many Japanese people are clamouring for their Macs to talk to them. I know there’s a serious paucity of native English speakers over there, but replacing them with Vicki, Fred or Bruce isn’t really the way to go.

Funny if a sizeable number did, though. I’d like to meet a Japanese person who has been vocally trained by the Mac Speech Synthesiser. Probably more amusing than my Japanese friend who spent a year in the north of England.

As to the difficulty of doing it, it’s a yes and no. On the one hand, there’s none of the inconsistency between characters and pronunciation if you have the hiragana, but in the absence of that (say with names), it would be a nightmare, because there’s no way (as far as I know, anyway) at this stage to attach metadata to a specific word in a block of text to give kanji a reading.

I’ve never extensively tested Microsoft’s Japanese synthesiser, so I don’t know how well it copes with random names.

By: eps

eps — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 17:07:19 +0000

you’re overlooking the number of Japanese natives with a desire to become fluent in English – a great majority of them

that being said, I’m really dying for Japanese voice synthesis as well. It shouldn’t be too hard either, I would imagine, since Japanese pronunciation is extremely straightforward compared to English.

By: l0ne

l0ne — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 13:39:05 +0000

Make no mistake — most pages in non-English languages link back to the English description for the features. Try rewriting the apple.com/macosx/… URL to apple.com/fr/macosx/… (or it or jp or etc.) and look for yourself.

By: chrisholland

chrisholland — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 21:55:51 +0000

And i’d happy to test out their french version whenever it comes out! if ever … :)