iSpeak  It 3.0

reviewed by Wayne LeFevre, November 2006

What is it?

Take any document or RSS feed and convert it into an MP3/AAC track in iTunes using your Mac's built-in text-to-speech capabilities. Download news, weather forecasts and driving directions. From there, it's a quick sync to your iPod.

How it works.   

First, it’s absolutely amazing, when paired with the right voices. The web site recommends using Cepstral voices, which are great on their own. But the software can really use any voice that is in your Speech-to-Text pane in your system preferences. Personally to my ear, that meant Acapela’s line of High Quality voices were incredible. I am told that Cepstral voices sound great on a Power PC. On my Mac Mini, they where a little choppy. Perhaps with a faster processor?

Internal Workings

What happens on the inside is you can either import, or write your own text in a familiar TextEdit type environment. From there you can have it speak back the text, using whatever voice you have picked in System Preferences/Speech/Text to Speech setting.

Sometimes, and it really all depends on which voice your using, it just cannot handle the word phonetically. This is odd, because it’s not as if Cepstral Voices or Assistiveware, (the company that distributes the Acapela voices through InfoVox iVox program,) handle text differently. It all depends on the individual voice. For example, some voices from both companies can handle the word ‘iPod’ correctly, and some say it like it was saying the word ‘epod’. The beauty of iSpeak It is that you do not have to go and change the internal pronunciations of Mac OS X’s System Preferences. It has its own replacement structure and commands that work similar to a word processors ability to “find” and “replace” words. You simply input that whenever you see the word iPod, replace it with the term “I Pod”, or even “eye pod”, and it will then translate and speak the word correctly. Now this is a physical change, so it doesn’t help much if you also would like to print the dialogue out.

Other really neat features are the icons on the toolbar. There is Download News, Download Weather Forecast, Download Driving Directions, Download RSS Feeds and Web Pages, and lastly, import document. One click on the Download News brings up all the days news from Google News with options to download the complete article. Other options include different world regions, Top Stories, Sports, Technology, Business, etc. And, of course, reading them aloud.

The same features are included with weather, driving directions, etc. There is even an option to take you to Project Gutenberg, the online book catalogue.

There are two options for saving your audio, if desired. There is Transfer to iTunes and Save Document as AIFF. When saving to AIFF, you save your document in AIFF format wherever you like on your hard drive. There are no options besides where to put it. In Transfer to iTunes, you can assign which encoder you would like, name, artist, album, genre and playlist. You can also have the choice of splitting the document, either by every X number of paragraphs or lines or text.

One feature I was unable to try is the ability to use Xgrid. Xgrid allows you to use multiple Macs (and/or multiple processors on a single Mac) to speed up processing. iSpeak It uses Xgrid to take the individual sections (defined by splitting the document) and convert them to audio on all available Macs. This helps to process documents faster, which is definitely an asset when trying to convert documents such as entire novels from Project Gutenberg.

Conclusion

I’ve been using iSpeak It to convert the macCompanion PDF into audio using voices from both Cepstral and Assistiveware. I’ve been very happy with the conversions, and it’s a very easy application to get used to and learn quickly. There are options that I have not even begun to learn, such as rate control, emphasizing and de-emphasizing words, putting in pauses and volume control. That will all come in time, and hopefully make my work sound even better for the listener. I would not hesitate to recommend this application and will continue to use it. I’ll be reviewing the  second text-to-speech application VisioVoice next month. We’ll see how it stacks up then.