scansoft

[jo]

Hi, just arrived, my first post, I have recently bought TA with the Neospeech voices, pretty good! But yesterday I bought wordread, mainly for the UK Scansoft voice, Jane, very good IMHO. As you would hope and expect Jane works fine in wordread, but as a visually-impaired user, I am trying to get it to work in TA (which has large print progressinve readout etc.). Well, it kind of works in Ta, but does not seem to notice full stops (periods), and much of the pronounciation editor stuff that one can do does not make much of a difference. As anyone else any knowledge of using scansoft 2 UK Jane or any scansoft voices with TA. It would be great if I could get it to work well. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. thanks JO

[jo]

It is working slightly better now, (I reinstalled everything) BUT, although it does just about notice fullstops and commas, about the same timing, it is quite a small silence, and I can't figure out a way to extend that silence. I tried putting in a pause, but it was just ignored, and I can now do some pronounciation changes. But if anyone can suggest a way that I might get it to create pauses, may be with regexes, I would be most greatful. thanks JO

[kdwhite]

We don't have any experience with this voice. Let me know where you bought it and maybe we can check it out.

Did you try the Predefined pauses under Options->TextAloud Preferences?

[jo]

Ken, I got it from Claro software, a UK company, the scansoft UK Jane voice is one of the many options that comes with their software WordRead. They do a downloadable version for winxp for just under 60 UK pounds. I tried out your suggestion in options, and, very strangely, if you enter any amount other than 0 it makes the existing pause worse! Jo

[jo]

I meant to add this to post above:

http://www.wordread.com should take you straight to the software. Jo

[kdwhite]

Found it this morning and we are talking about ordering to work on the voice interface.

[jo]

That would be great! It would be really good if it could happily run, on TA. Thanks, JO

[jo]

Well, I contacted the wordread people (where I got the scansoft voice), and they sent me the win 98 installation of their product (including of course the scansoft voice), which comes on a CD and is not included in the commercial download. This version works fine with TA, it is a sapi4 version of the scansoft Jane voice. So, it seems that the problem is with the sapi5 scansoft jane voice - which - by the way won't seem to run on win98. Does anyone know if one can as yet buy Scansoft voices directly? Jo

[kdwhite]

From what I gather in talking with them, they don't want to allow
1) Anyone to sell the voices alone
2) Anyone to sell versions of the voices with their own product that would work with any other product.

In a lot of ways, this makes sense for them business wise, but hurts the consumer somewhat.

As far as us using them directly, in our talks with them, though the voices are expensive, we were going to move forwrd with it, but they would only allow us to sell a version that would work aloud, it wouldn't allow creation of audio files using the voices, so we pulled the plug on it and will be working with other companies to fill the void.

[jo]

Thanks for the update, Jo