Alex, the new voice in Leopard is amazingly natural. But who uses the text-to-speech feature on a daily basis? Me, never. A shame, though, to let such a cool technology alone in the dark (or whatever lightening they have where they use it). I would use it if

• It was a feature in Safari on my iPhone
• I could pause it when reading aloud on my desktop

Yesterday, when listening to an email from the guy across from my desk, I realised it actually breathes. Complementing the illusion of a professional speaker person reading aloud, it has built-in lung capacity, and it’s quite convincing. Listen (wait for the idiot to finish typing):

In fact, when Alex speaks a long passage, you’ll even hear him breathe. Apple built human lung capacity and human sentence parsing into its speech synthesizer, so Alex would sound more like us when he speaks. The synthesizer inserts a breath based on a variety of factors: appropriateness, the structure of the text being read, the time since the last breath, and the time until Alex finishes speaking.

Apple: Voice over in depth

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