speaking in Japanese

Hello Gebana,

The problem is that Apple only provides text-to-speech in English. To make VoiceOver work in Japanese, you will need a Japanese text-to-speech engine. There are several around, but the most suitable one would appear to come free with a shareware notes program, VoiceNotes. You can get this program via Version Tracker. Here's the link:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23720

The shareware fee is $29.00.

I can't test it out for you as I don't speak Japanese…

Once you have the Japanese TTS installed, you should then set the system voice to that name (in the Speech control pane of System Preferences) and the various speech options of VoiceOver to use the same voice via the VoiceOver utility.
The VoiceOver utility is also the key to making the non-localised strings sound OK, by using its Pronunciation tab. For example, you could tell VO to say the Japanese phrase for "interacting with" when it encounters the English words "interacting with". This will prevent the "Japanese voice speaking Engrish very badry" syndrome.

The next problem is the "input method", otherwise known as the keyboard layout. I assume you'll be needing to type mostly in Japanese, so you should have the keyboard set that way. However, VoiceOver, when the VO keys are held down, interprets the keyboard as the English layout (British or US). So when navigating, you'll have to remember the English layout, and when typing a document, the Japanese!

This presents a problem when setting up the pronunciation dictionary I referred to earlier. I recommend that you create an English-language user as well as your main Japanese-language user. Then you can switch from one to the other using Fast User Switching.
Prepare a list of VoiceOver terms in English that you wish to have read in Japanese, under the English user-id, then save the document into the Shared folder. Change to the Japanese user, open the shared document, and clipboard a phrase at a time into the VoiceOver Utility Pronunciation Dictionary. Then type in the Japanese equivalent.
Obviously, your list of English terms will be an evolving document as you find more annoying phrases!

My wife has done this with a French voice and it works pretty well on the whole.

Let us know how you get on!

Archie

Thanks for the valuable info about VoiceNotes! First time I've heard of anything that could speak Japanese in OS X.

How can I change the text-to-speech language to Swedish so that I can highlight Swedish text and have the computer speak it correctly?

Jessica

Hello Jessica,

A Swedish voice must be installed on your Mac. One supplier is Acapela which provides a Swedish voice as part of its forthcoming VisioVoice product. This, however, is a much more complete software package, and probably would be unjustifiably expensive if you only want the voice. However, Acapela does intend to bring out all its voices for installation under Mac OS X in the near future.

One person working on Swedish speech synthesis is Jonas Bohlenius. I don't know whether he could advise or not—I haven't tracked him down yet, but am trying.

We ought to be able to find something for you!

All the best,

Archie

iBook G4 12" 1.2 GHz, G4 Sawtooth 400 MHz, PowerBook G4 17" 1.67 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.5)

I was wondering if you could explain in further detail how to install the Japanese TTS so that it shows up as a voice in the Speech control pane of System Preferences.

I've just installed VoiceNotes version 2.1 but apparently the installation process doesn't automatically add the Japanese speaking voices to the Speech control. Are there other programs that do? Is it possible to install the VoiceNotes voices manually?

I'm sorry, I can't help any further. I can't read Japanese, so the documentation on the website might as well be Greek to me—hold on… ;-)=

I think you'll have to contact the publisher and ask for a procedure for installing the voice so that it's accessible to the system. As I said above, I've never done this myself, as Japanese isn't one of my languages.

Sorry!

Archie

iBook G4 12" 1.2 GHz, G4 Sawtooth 400 MHz, PowerBook G4 17" 1.67 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Actually, VisioVoice is a product by AssistiveWare ( http://www.assistiveware.com/) that will be release shortly. It will come bundled with Infovox iVox, which is an Acapela product and is also avaiable in Swedish. Infovox iVox will be distributed worldwide by AssistiveWare and will also be available for separate purchase if you just need the Swedish voices. However, the price difference between Infovox iVox and the bundle with VisioVoice is small, so you should definitly check out whether the speech features in VisioVoice would be useful to you. They include reading documents (Word, PDF, HTML, RTF) and highlighting words or sentences as they are being spoken, as well as the generation of speech to audio file and iTunes tracks.

Both products are now expected in early September.

Hope this helps,

david.