Text to Speech Technology Goes Multimedia

Text to speech technology on Mac OS systems has primarily been of limited use, often serving more as a novelty feature opposed to an aid for any project of importance. Though satisfactory, the voice options in Tiger weren't very appealing with overstuffed digitalization, along with the lack of proper word pronunciation and realistic accents.

Healthy Uses of Text to Speech Technology

Cepstral, a leading provider in text to speech technology, was the first to exploit Apple's deficiency by producing a wider variety of voices that could be used on the system for a number of different tasks. Cepstral enabled computer users to employ the technology in everyday tasks, such as commanding the machine to read the time at set intervals and providing verbal notification to let them know when an email had arrived. Furthermore, Cepstral's text to speech technology enabled more creative uses including the ability to read email messages aloud or even complete articles. This offered substantial benefits in the way of productivity and health for users who were normally confined to their computer and keyboard.

Text to Speech Technology via MP3 Players

Despite all the advancements in text to speech technology, users were still required to sit down at their computers and read or listen to text, a factor that ruined its appeal. This is changing quickly with the current popularity of MP3 players.

As digital technology enhanced and hard disk drives were given larger storage capacities, text to speech became more appealing as programs such as GhostReader were developed. Created by Convenience Ware, GhostReader is an advanced application that offers more realistic voices, as well as voices in numerous languages. This program is equipped with a simple user interface that enables the quick analysis of text and speech conversion. These conversions can be transferred into an AAC format for compatibility with an iPod or MP3 file for integration with other portable players.

This revolution in text to speech technology opened up opportunities for documents, PDF files, emails and web pages to be converted into speech files and sent to portable media players. Users of the Mac OS X are now liberated from their desktops and can not only travel with their work on a portable device, but also have their important files converted from text to speech.

Learning Languages via Text to Speech Technology

The market shift has enabled those wishing to learn other languages to utilize text to speech technology as a part of their training methods. The process of transferring foreign text to portable media players has made it possible to play back written words, and slowly yet effectively learn the pronunciation of specific phrases. Language students are no longer limited to reading up on subjects assigned to them, as they can now listen to text on virtually any subject. Text to speech technology has indeed become a valuable tool for a wide range of purposes.

Leopard, Apple's newest version of Mac OS X, has introduced new and improved speech to text technology to its users. While users of Tiger remain limited, the capability of MP3 players and software by companies such as Convenience Ware and Cepstral have made it possible to listen to regular text documents, PDFs and RSS feeds on the older system.