Hear new Mail messages announced by customized voices

Mar 18, '03 09:28:00AM

Contributed by: AMacAddict

I have been patiently waiting for computers to catch up to Star Trek and start talking. I noticed a Java app to announce e-mail senders, so I downloaded Lisa from speakingassistant.com. Although it made sense afterward, I was blindly imagining my computer saying "A new message has arrived from Kenny Rogers." The voice for Lisa's announcements sounds great, but they are samples. As such, they are therefore limited to a set of generic senders, such as 'client,' 'a good friend,' 'your french maid,' etc.

I am not saying Lisa is a bad program, just not what I wanted. A random charge crossed the gap between my two brain cells, and now I'm much closer to what I originally wanted. First I visited AT&T's Natural Voices demo page. At this page, you can demo AT&T's smashingly realistic Natural Voices Text To Speech with your own text. I typed in vocal bits for the people I cared to have announced, and then saved the resulting AIF (click on the arrow at the far right of the QuickTime player toolbar). Add a simple "If from contains kennyrogers then play sound 'kennyrogersmail.aif'" rule to Mail, and it announces personalized sender messages!

Hopefully I'm not the only dork who thinks this is fun...

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