April 27, 2024

Listen to Some of the Nuance Voices Found in Mac OS X Lion

Posted May 16, 2011 at 8:04pm by iClarified · 9139 views
In the last few weeks there have been numerous reports of a collaboration between Apple and Nuance to bring their voice recognition technology to Mac OS X and iOS.

Netputing recently found that voice samples found in Mac OS X Lion are in fact the same voice Nuance uses in its RealSpeak product.

Here is something I discovered while listening to the new voices sample in OSX Lion. They are a perfect match to those that used to be part of Nuance RealSpeak Solo product… Now, the thing is that Nuance RealSpeak Solo is no more to be found on their web sites… how strange is that.

OSX Daily has now linked to some of those voice for those interested in taking a listen.
English American Accent – Samantha
English British Accent – Serena
English British Accent – Serena
Spanish – Monica
Finnish – Mikko
German – Yannick
Mandarin Chinese – Mei Ling

You can listen to more voices at the NextUp Nuance Sample page, but even that contains only a fraction of what is listed in Lion’s new Speech preferences.

Currently if you try to install any of the voices in Mac OS X Lion you will get an error.

Interestingly, an Apple patent was recently discovered which details how text-to-speech and speech-to-text would work on a future iPhone.

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