Scott Gillen ZL1CHM writes:
> Gday Martin
> 
> Wondering if you are useing speach with the Mac and what you think of it?

	It's mostly wonderful. I said on another list that the
glass was about 2/3 full.

	The voice is one of the best sounding voices I have
heard. There are a couple of other novelty voices that are good
for a chuckle but the default male voice they named Alex is
pleasant to listen to and easy to understand.

	The one thing I was disappointed in was the performance
of the UNIX terminal program or maybe the way the speech engine
interacts with the terminal program.

	What happens is that newer input causes the speech
engine to reset and kills off the speech one was listening to.
That is good for keyboard input but bad for data coming in from
the big wide world or even a local program one is running such
as when compiling source on a UNIX system. You'll start to hear
something but before you can listen to all of it, it gets cut
off and something else clobbers it.

	When reading documentation or the contents of a window,
however, it is excellent as speech synthesizers go.

	Except for the learning curve, I really like it and I
would have had a learning curve had I gone with Windows.

	I philosophically like Apple's including the screen
reader in the operating system. In my opinion, it is the only
way to do things. Now, any Mac running OSX-10.4 or later is
accessible and one could just walk up to a suitable Mac and use
it if needed.

	Also, the security updates and patches are less likely
to break speech because Voiceover is just as much a part of the
OS as the video processing software.

	All in all, it is not perfection yet, but I'd give it a
B and hope they fix that speech engine so that it is more under
our control and not subject to resetting on the next delayed
input.

	In fairness, you can review the data that came in and
hear it properly, but that is not a substitute for being able to
listen to it as it comes in.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group