Apple (News - Alert) users now have many dialects and diverse languages available to them as an option.
OS X Lion provides several text-to-speech voices with many offerings. There are 22 languages. There are also over 50 new voices included in Lion. Examples are an Australian English "Lee" voice and a Mexican Spanish "Javier" voice.
Text-to-speech voices are available in Arabic, three Chinese dialects, Czech, Danish, two versions of Dutch, Finnish, two French dialects, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, two Portuguese dialects, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, two Spanish dialects, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.
The updates offer improved pronunciation and clarity, AppleInsider said.
Also, the OS X voices are offered via Software Updates for Apple.
According to AppleInsider, the newer voices are not included in the Lion installation but need to be downloaded separately. The new Mountain Lion OS X also keeps the voice of Alex, which dates back to OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Users can preview each voice before actually choosing to download them. Voices are in 350 to 500 MB files – limiting how many can be downloaded if there is minimal hard drive or bandwidth space. Voice options are found in the upgraded Dictation & Speech "pref" panel.
“Many of the new voices sound natural enough that having my Mac ‘talk’ to me is now a useful feature, even though I don't have any accessibility requirements that make them necessary as they are for some users,” according to a recent review from TUAW by Chris Rawson. “In particular, Australian voice ‘Lee’ makes my MacBook Pro sound like a bloke worth taking down to the pub for a pint, and that's a feature definitely worth having.”
In other recent news, Centrify Corp. is offering DirectControl for Mac. It supports the new Apple Mac OS X Mountain Lion OS with Active Directory-based authentication, access control and Group Policy.