Natural Voices is on the market.  A desktop edition costs $50, and
additional higher-fidelity "voice fonts" for some of the speakers are $50
each.  I just installed it here at work yesterday, even though my PC
doesn't meet the minimum system requirements and it would run me out of
disk space if I allowed it to.

At the moment it is a SAPI 5.1 text-to-speech engine, so only HAL knows how
to drive it.  A SAPI 4 version, compatible with the other screen readers
for Windows, is supposed to come out about April 1.  The person who tried
it with HAL said it could take ten seconds between when you hit a key and
when you heard the utterance.

You want to have at least 256 megs of RAM.  Each voice font (high-fi) takes
up 678 Megabyts of disk space.  It sounds good, especially on female
speech, but I think it will be best suited for reading files rather than
being driven by a screen reader, for the next 3 years or so.

At 10:28 AM 3/20/02 -0500, you wrote:
>paul and dick.  if you have an msapi complient speech engine, you can
>use it with jaws.  the speech that was used in the demo that Dick
>provided earlier is micke from microsoft speech or at least that I what
>it sounded like.  I don't know about the att voices.  I have not seen a
>speech engine for this.
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Dick Banks" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 10:07 PM
>Subject: Re: TextAloud MP3
>
>
>I have the older TectAlout and that uses the Microsoft voices. You can
>get
>that version on CD for $39.00 if I remember correctly.
>
>I am not exactly sure what you mean by tied in with JAWS.
>
>Dickew
>
>At 07:36 AM 3/20/2002, you wrote:
>>I'm not sure TextAloud would meet any of our needs, but I like the
>voices
>>that they use.  I understand they're from A T and T.  Can these be tied
>to
>>JAWS as an alternative speech engine?
>>
>>Paul Chapin
>>Curricular Computing Specialist
>>Amherst College
>
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