Cepstral Voices for Mac

Have always really liked the CEPSTRAL DIANE voice as it sounds like the actress from Desperate Housewives and Dallas.

I purchased the "Laurence package," version 4, which gives a reasonable facsimile of british english, but that's where my praise ends! I deleted it because Apple's "Alex" sounds more human. I could see no improvements when I tried version 6. It was annoying to be reminded every 20 seconds right from the start that I had not upgraded. Cheapskates! Why upgrade? It is no better. Then, after I uninstalled it using the command in the preference pane and switched back to Alex. It continued to speak only the Laurence voice. It's not enough to be mediocre and expensive software, but once you install it, you can't easily get rid of it. Beware!

Cepstral Voices 6 has been out for a couple of months now. The current version is 6.2.3.685.

Downloaded DAMIEN as the first test, and never got past that one. It was easy to install, and easy to operate, for a character voice it was interesting but very difficult to understand many of the words it was given... but that's not even going to be part of the rating. After quickly tiring of the voice, I attempted to get my regular Apple voices back... but they were totally frakked up, all sounding like someone had bashed a person over the head with a crowbar, and then had their head held under water... for 2 seconds.. and then silence. It did this to ALL the voices, so it obviously screwed up either the engine or the prefpane. So I attempted to try the "super easy to do" complete uninstall. Even though it asked if I was sure, and even though it prompted me for my Admin password (which I gave it), it did absolutely nothing to remove any part of itself from either the prefpanes, the prefs folder, Application support, and wherever else it might have stuck things. It did not remove the prefpane, and the voices were still screwed up. I used FileBuddy to track down 3 parts of it, but could not find the PrefPane for it, and attempting to manually delete it from the System Prefs, just had it telling me that it had to abort removing "%@" because an error occurred. Yes, that's PERCENT-AT ^_^ Searched for that even, but it couldn't find it. It's still there, and I still have frakked voices. The features might be nice, but if it completely screws your system AND won't allow itself to be uninstalled, it's not worth even getting paid to use it. On top of that, the price is extraordinarily high for a voice file anyway. One that intones everything properly, doesn't mispronounce anything, and doesn't get boring, might be worth the price asked, but this didn't do any of that. I'm more satisfied with the Victoria voice that came with OSX (unless the character voice is deliberately of less quality than the other voices.) I'm now going to boot up my emergency partition so I can remove everything from the System disc, that wasn't there Friday, and pray that fixes this. If it corrupted a system file, that'll take about 12 hours for a complete restore. I still really would like a Japanese voice or two that would work with Kanji, but haven't found one, yet. Not that I'd trust this company for one.

THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS. THERE IS A NEW VERSION OF Cepstral Voices WITH AN UPGRADE FEE. HOWEVER, THERE ARE PAGES AND PAGES OF ISSUES ON THE CEPSTRAL WEBSITE THAT SHOW THAT THIS VERSION 5 DOESN'T WORK and can crash your system. THE VERSION I PAID FOR STOPPED WORKING AND THE NEW VERSION BARELY, BARELY WORKS. WHO WANTS THAT??? THIS SHOWS ALL THE WAYS THAT THE NEW VERSION STILL DOESN'T WORK. IF CEPSTRAL CAN'T SPEND THE TIME AND MONEY TO MAKE THEIR PRODUCT WORK WITH THE NEWEST MACOS, THEY SHOULD ABANDON IT AND STOP RIPPING PEOPLE OFF WHO DON';T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE PAYING FOR!!! HERE IS AN ABBREVIATED LIST OF DEFICIENCIES IN THIS SOFTWARE THAT IS POATED ON THE COMPANY'S OWN WEBSITE. AT LEAST THE COMPANY IS BEING UPFRONT BUT THEY STILL WANT TO TAKE YOUR MONEY AND GIVE YOU JUNK IN RETURN. 1. The voices may go silent due to the system's audio properties having been adjusted to incompatible settings. 2. Cepstral voices stop speaking sometimes when used in VoiceOver. They will not speak again through VoiceOver until you log out and log back in. This problem occurs mostly if you use Command+Tab to switch between tasks or if you use Ctrl+Option+D to move the cursor to the dock and cycle through dock items. 3. When reading text copied from Safari, line breaks may occasionally be pronounced as question marks. 4. Word highlighting text positions are wrong when the volume is not set to 1.0. 5. Text position information passed to user callbacks is incorrect with certain settings, causing word highlighting to break. 6. Apple's pronunciation dictionaries are not supported. You can still use cross-platform Cepstral user lexicons, however. 7. Synthesis to phonemes -- the TextToPhonemes() API call -- is not supported. Error and synchronization callbacks are not supported. 8. When stopping speech, the synthesizer will always halt immediately, instead of waiting until the next word or sentence when requested. 9. Tuned phonetic input -- the [[inpt tune]] embedded command -- is ignored. In phonemes mode, all prodosic control symbols, with the exception of primary syllable stress, are ignored. 10. Some linebreaks are pronounced as "dot question mark." 11. If you use the Migration Assisant to transfer data and programs from one Mac to another, including Cepstral voices, your Cepstral voices may not function properly on the new computer. 12. If you enable "Announce the Time" under Date & Time preferences and set it to use a Cepstral voice, you cannot change the voice afterwards, even to a different Cepstral voice. Even if you set it to "Use System Voice," it continues to use your selection. Logging out and/or restarting do not solve the problem. 13. "interpret-as" attributes of "" elements are not properly handled. If the input text contains back-to-back SSML elements, swift only handles the 14. last one in the list. For instance, the following only pauses for three seconds instead of five: 15. RIFF audio files with a sampling rate that differs from the native sampling rate of the voice are not correcly resampled when specified using the SSML element. 16. Applications using Swift TTS exit silently when a sentence that begins with an SSML or tag is fed to a non-US English voice for synthesis. 17. Swift does not currently support the xml:lang attribute of SSML tags that make use of it, such as , , etc. 18. Swift does not reject bad SSML markup. It will complain about blatant syntactic errors, such as missing close tags, but not about semantic errors, such as invalid tags and attributes. 19. The SSML and tags may not have the proper effect. This is supposed to be read as two sentences, but we read it as one: 20. Swift does not currently support the SSML tag for adding additional lexicons. 21. The SSML tag:attribute pair should select a neuter-gendered voice, but it currently does nothing. 22. The "age" attribute to the SSML tag is looking for an exact match, when it probably ought to be looking for the closest match. For instance, will only select a ten-year-old voice, or fall back to the default voice if one is not found. 23. Cannot provide multiple voice selections in the SSML tag. The tag should request David, and use William as a fallback. Instead, Swift interprets as a request for a voice named "David William." 24. The default SSML voice may not be the default voice for that gender. To illustrate, Swift may switch voices while executing the following SSML code, when it should not. 25. Changing voice in SSML resets prosody and pitch. 26. The duration attribute of the SSML tag is not supported. 27. Prosody as specified in the SSML prosody element is not applied to output generated using the SSML phoneme element. 28. Pitch contours passed in via the SSML tag with values not falling between 0% and 100% are supposed to be ignored. Swift attempts to synthesize with these bogus values. 29. SAMPA stress markers in SSML tag not supported. 30. The SSML tag causes a crash in Canadian French, Americas Spanish, and Italian voices. 40. Text position synthesis event information is incorrect when the SSML element is encountered.