Acapela and AssistiveWare Deliver Children’s Voices for Macs OS X
AssistiveWare and Acapela Group have released Infovox iVox 3.1, which brings the first four children’s voices to Mac OS X. In addition, the update adds three new male voices. These voices work with any Mac application, including Apple’s VoiceOver, TextEdit, Preview, Safari, Adobe's Acrobat Reader, AssistiveWare's VisioVoice, Proloquo, and GhostReader.
To support the needs of younger users, Infovox iVox 3.1 offers a total of four genuine children's text-to-speech voices: boy and girl voices for both U.S. AND U.K. English. The voices were recorded by and for children.
In addition, the update offers three new male voices, two American voices, Will and the southern-sounding Micah voice, as well as the Australian Tyler voice. Besides adding new voices, Infovox iVox 3.1 also fixes an issue with characters with diacritical marks. Words that contain accents will now be pronounced correctly in any foreign language.
"We are extremely happy that the new naturally-sounding children's voices that were originally developed by AssistiveWare and Acapela Group for use in our Proloquo2Go and Pictello iPad apps are now also available on Mac OS X," said David Niemeijer, CEO and founder of AssistiveWare, in a statement. "Now children can listen to a voice resembling their own age in educational apps, when listening to PDFs, or when using Apple's VoiceOver screen reader for vision-impaired users."
"This groundbreaking project is the first of its kind in the industry," said Lars-Erik Larsson, CEO of Acapela Group, in a statement. "With over 2,500 hours of research, recording, processing, and development, the new children's voices are a fulfilling result and a reflection of our longtime leadership in this field."
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