A colleague of mine has setup a blog and it was a very interesting read last night. Well actually, I wouldn’t know what it was like to read it as I left this to my new friend Alex  - the Text to Speech software built into Leopard.

As Sid points out in his blog, a recent GUI lecture was on the topic of data sonification.

This feature has been around for a while on mac and has been a novelty in previous releases but the new voice ‘Alex’ which features in Leopard is strides ahead of what came before. I actually pref having Alex read my instant messages to me as my focus is elsewhere and find it far more efficient having him read out details of system errors rather than having my flow interrupted by dialogue boxes.

Alex reading is quite natural and even breathes during periods and commas. I was able to hear Sid’s blog and enjoy it like a kid being read a story in bed.

AT&T Labs have enhanced their text to speech algorithm and you can try it out with a number of different voices, even a few made for french/german. My favourite one is Anjali who has an indian call-center voice. This site also allows you to save wav files of the given text input, and so this is perfect for prank calling people or creating custom error messages for your system

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