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Some observations
Authored by: Mike Perry on Mar 16, '09 08:39:05AM

I use speech-to-text to proof books at about 200 wpm and i come across something that's misread about every fifteen minutes or so. Many seem to be dropped words or slight mispronunciations ("not" for "now" or vice-versa) when reading a long section, mistakes that don't repeat when reading again or reading just a phrase. And it seems to have gotten much worse with 10.5, the very version where they enhanced text-to-speech.

I get the impression that the parsing is driven by the wpm speed. If time gets short, to keep up that speed it drops a word or pronounces some similar word instead. That explains why it can be erratic. That can also be frustrating, since it means users are forced to stop and check something that isn't wrong or, in the case of the visually impaired, hear something different from the original. (It's easy to imagine a not/now mispronunciation radically altering the meaning.)

The UI for text-to-speech is also poor. An old Classic program, Tex-Edit, did text-to-speech right. It defaulted to reading starting at the cursor and continuing until stopped (easily) by the user. It also moved the displayed text and highlighted what was being read.

Unfortunately, Tex-Edit isn't keeping up with OS X and is getting a bit quirky, so there's no application I know of that does text-to-speech good enough for proofing. Over time, you can learn to tell the difference in pause between a comma and a period, but it'd be great to have a text-to-speech reader than could read out punctuation. Eyes can grow tired trying to spot the difference between a semicolon and a colon.

Most developers of text applications are limited by what Cocoa Text can do. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be more intent on mimicking Microsoft Word when they enhance Cocoa Text than in coming up with really creative and impressive enhancements. InDesign users love the GREP search and replace that was added in CS3. It wouldn't be that hard to add GREP to Cocoa Text and thus to most OS X text applications. And Apple could enhance stock GREP by added S&R templates that users could use across multiple applications and pass on to others.





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Some observations
Authored by: auco on Mar 17, '09 03:47:10AM

hm... what do you need the highlight for? If someone reads for you, I cannot see the point why you want to read along with it.
Anyway, if you install the Developer Tools, there's an application that you might like: /Developer/Examples/Speech/Synthesis/SpeechSynthesisExample



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