Change to female voice?

The setting for +Text to Speech+ is on System Preferences Speech pane +Text to Speech+ tab. Just change the +System Voice+ from the default Alex to one of your liking.

Actually, this is the iPod shuffle category, so if you are asking if you can change the VoiceOver voice on the new shuffle, I don't know...

Voice seems to be language specific. So in other words, whatever voice you get with English is what you are going to get.

If you are really hot to hear a female voice, you could change the default announcing voice to something else (you can do this for menus - summary screen for ipod and for tracks - options menu for tracks)like Japanese. However, if you do this, it will speak the english words with a japanese accent... which is actually kind of cool.

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However, if you do this, it will speak the english words with a japanese accent...

THAT I've got to HEAR!

Why does the voice sound different between syncing with a Mac and syncing with a Windows PC? That's what the +Guided Tour+ video seems to indicate.

Mine has a female voice on 10.4.11.

The female english voice is apparently what you get with windows or 10.4.11.

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I'm just wondering why the voice is dependent on the OS that is being used. Seems like the device (the iPod) would generate the same voice. Is it some licensing issue, where it costs Apple less per iPod if it is using the same voice that the host computer is using?

Sorry... probably going off-topic.

iTunes does it...

What is this "it" that iTunes does?

Is iTunes actually recording all the possible things that VoiceOver might need to say on the iPod shuffle (based on the song and artist and playlist names of the synced songs), and storing those tiny bits of audio as a file on the shuffle? Then, the iPod shuffle accesses and plays back the specific bits of audio as needed, based on what the user does with the VoiceOver function?

If that's how VoiceOver works, it is a very clever way to bypass the need for the tiny iPod shuffle to have the processing power to actually generate the voice internally.

Yeah, that actually makes sense... can anyone confirm? If that is how VoiceOver works, my appreciation for Apple's ingenuity just went up yet another notch.

Kenichi Watanabe wrote:
What is this "it" that iTunes does?

Is iTunes actually recording all the possible things that VoiceOver might need to say on the iPod shuffle (based on the song and artist and playlist names of the synced songs), and storing those tiny bits of audio as a file on the shuffle? Then, the iPod shuffle accesses and plays back the specific bits of audio as needed, based on what the user does with the VoiceOver function?

If that's how VoiceOver works, it is a very clever way to bypass the need for the tiny iPod shuffle to have the processing power to actually generate the voice internally.

Yeah, that actually makes sense... can anyone confirm? If that is how VoiceOver works, my appreciation for Apple's ingenuity just went up yet another notch.

Yes iTunes creates the voice tags for each track and playlist and attaches then to each music files and then transfers them over to the iPod. The only processing that the ipod then has to do is play the little audio file. Did you really think that the ipod was actually doing text to speach processing with the tiny little processor that it has?

Didn't seem possible. That's why I was wondering how the magic was done?

But I think most people assume the iPod shuffle is generating the voice, or they do not even care how it is done, as long as it works.

And most companies who make such products would dismiss a feature like VoiceOver as being impossible with current technology; their engineers would be boxed-in with the assumption that, if a device needed to talk and read the the names of over 1000 random songs, albums, and playlists, the device would have to generate the voice. That's how a computer would do it. But Apple found a clever way that is not that different from the way the album art is stored in a common database file. From the user's perspective, it seems like the tiny shuffle IS doing all the talking (in the same way a computer talks). Real world Magic is deception, and this is a great example.

One downside though is disk usage. I had maybe 3gb uploaded to my iPod tonight after getting it. In iTunes on the file usage bar it said I had about 327mb of "other" files on there.

If the "other" files was referring to the pre-generated voice tags, then based on the amount of songs I had, that was about 390k average size for each tag.