Hi all, First, yes, this is about a speech synthesizer, and will thus be very subjective. I wanted to see, though, if anyone else might have come to the same conclusion I have.
I got a Mac in the days of Lion, and quickly switched to the Vocalizer voices (Serena or Lee, mostly). When we got new ones in Mavericks, I favored Ava, and she is still among the best voices I know of, except a couple from Ivona. In testing things for Yosemite, I kept switching from Ava to Alex, just to see if any problems were being caused by the use of Nuance voices. I accidentally made a startling discovery: Alex used to be pretty bad a few years ago, but now, he's quite good. I've always liked the breathing thing, but Alex would constantly run words together, mispronounce syllables, and have other small problems that made him hard to understand, especially at higher speeds. The more I use him in Yosemite, though, the more I look for reasons to switch back to Ava, but the more those reasons allude me. Ava misses the period after certain words, like "app", Alex doesn't; Ava says "capital" before uppercase letters, although that setting is disabled, and Alex doesn't; VoiceOver has delays when opening the VO Utility or bringing up VO menus while using Nuance voices, but with Alex, I find no such delays; and more. So, is it just me, or has Alex gotten way better? I don't mean "better" in that VoiceOver runs faster while using Alex, although it certainly does. I mean "better" in that, compared to a few years ago, he's far clearer when speaking and makes far fewer mistakes. Maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe I'm the only one to notice, since the change was likely gradual and thus invisible to those who have used Alex all along. Either way, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts, and I'm more eager than ever to obtain a 64-bit iPhone so I can start using Alex there as well. My only complaint about Alex is that he doesn't speed up very well - sure, he can go crazy fast, but I find I miss things at more than 70% speaking rate. Anyway, what do you all think? If you haven't used Alex in a long time, give him another chance. If you use him all the time, have you noticed anything? -- Have a great day, Alex Hall mehg...@icloud.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
