MacinTalk 3 introduced a great variety of voices. It remained the recommended version for slower machines even after the release of MacinTalk 3 and Pro. It supports any Macintosh running System Software 6.0.7 or later.

Hughes and Marvin voicesĮventually, Apple released a supported speech synthesis system, called MacinTalk 2. Input to the synthesizer can be controlled explicitly using a special phoneme alphabet. The volume, pitch and rate of the speech can be configured as well, allowing for singing. There are various control sequences that can be used to fine-tune the intonation and rhythm. American English and Spanish versions have been available, but since the advent of Mac OS X, Apple has shipped only American English voices, relying on third-party suppliers such as Acapela Group to supply voices for other languages (in OS X 10.7, Apple licensed a lot of third-party voices and made them available for download within the Speech control panel).Īn application programming interface known as the Speech Manager enables third-party developers to use speech synthesis in their applications.

Compared to other methods of synthesizing speech, it is not very resource-intensive, but limits how natural the speech synthesis can be. Software Speech synthesis Technology Īpple's text-to-speech uses diphones.

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