Nuance or Acapela voices?

[ig77]

Hi all - I was planning on buying some new voices and wanted to know your opinions on Acapela and Nuance voices. Which of these two do you like and why?

[yxifix]

Nuance have several good voices... I prefer to read with high speeds and from Nuance, Jennifer is the best for me, also Karen is good. Lee, Samantha, Serena, Tom are not bad either, if you want to try.

I've just tried out Acapela Peter voice - and this is a real class. Sounds great when reading fast or slower, I've tried to select few difficult words just to check and compare pronunciation and it seems like Peter is a clear winner here as well.

[kremesch]

Both are great. Tom and Jennifer are the best from Nuance, and they can be used with any program. They're much easier to understand, but they don't sound as natural as Acapela, and they don't come with a dictionary editor either. So, unless you're using a program that has it's own editor (Like TA and many others), you're kind of stuck with what you got.

Acapela sounds more natural, but harder to understand at times. I find Heather the easiest on the ears. The drawback to Acapela is that they can only be used with the program they're sold with (this is Acapela's licensing terms). In this case, if you get them from NextUp, the voices will only work with TextAloud - no other program. They come with their own dictionary editor, which is a bonus, but it's not really necessary because TA already has an excellent editor.