Chimoosoft's Mac Picks and Reviews
Picks Archive
This page is part of our archive. For weekly reviews of software and hardware for Mac OS X, please visit our main OS X Picks page.
Cepstral Text-to-Speech
- 4
- demo
- 1/8/2007
Do you enjoy text-to-speech, but are tired of the built in Mac OS X voices? Cepstral has ten US English voices available for download as well as UK English, Italian, Canadian French, German, and Americas Spanish. After installing, they appear in the speech System Preference pane alongside the traditional voices.
The quality of the voices is comparable to the best Apple provided voices, and some of them such as Callie, William, and David may be superior. Cepstral also includes a command line utility called "swift" which allows you to synthesize voice directly into an audio file. For example, swift -n Callie -f review.txt -o cepstral.wav produced this sample file. The demo voices vocally ask you to register before speaking your text but are still fun to play with.
An assortment of the best software and hardware for Mac OS X chosen from around the web and briefly reviewed. Our picks are normally updated on a weekly basis, so check back often for more! No, we don't take requests for reviews at this time; the programs are chosen solely by the reviewer and tend to be lesser known but useful titles which deserve a bit more attention.
The companies or individuals producing reviewed software or hardware are in no way affiliated with Chimoosoft. Software reviewed includes freeware, shareware, commercial, and built in to the OS. All software is tested with the most recent shipping version of Mac OS X currently available at the time of the review.
The software reviews above are for programs (a.k.a. software) for the Macintosh OS X (ten) operating system (Mac OS X, or sometimes just osx). A program may also be referred to as a utility or application depending on its intended purpose. Reviews are copyright 2006-2007 by Chimoosoft.