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Friday, April 12, 2002

Software: Been there. Done that

Apple made the computer talk even while others were still working on the idea. Speech synthesis is not at all new to Mac users. Their machines diligently announce error messages, read Web pages or text documents. Apple’s speech synthesis technology is called PlainTalk and converts text to spoken words. 

A Mac reads out two kinds of text—one is from applications and the other is a system message. Within applications, you can have SimpleText files read out aloud, Web pages made speakable, etc. With SimpleText, just select a particular section of the text and go to the Sound menu to have it read out to you. The shortcut is Apple key+J. You can also change the reading voice from the Sound menu. There are 25 different voices in Mac OS 9.1 and they range from regular male and female voices to interesting ones like Deranged, Hysterical or Whisper.

Alert messages like Not able to load a Web page, Confirm delete, etc are read out to the user after a wait interval. This catches your attention when you are busy on something else and the Mac knows that you have not paid attention to it. These are called Talking Alerts and the settings can be controlled from the Speech Control Panel in the Dock bar. In the Speech Control Panel, you can set the default voice and the way an alert should be read. For example, you can choose a default read of the alert message in the box, or can add a preset phrase to it, say Oh My! or It’s not my fault!. The preset phrases are an exciting way of announcing and you may even randomize them to be pre-said before the actual alert message. The voice playback rate is also adjusted from this control panel.

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