Whilst attending the excellent Making a Difference SA Expo last week, conducted at Hindmarsh, Jim Sprialis, Craig and I discovered that some high quality Australian text to speech (TTS) Karen and Lee were available as free downloads for MAC OS users.
These voices are freely available for download in the later versions of MAC OS 10.7 (or later). Check out the link at: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/07/24/os-x-lion-introduces-new-multilingual-high-quality-text-to-spe/ for more details.
They will install into the speech panel in System Preferences and be available to all programs that support these TTS voice engines.
‘These new voices, sourced from Nuance, are not only available in several dialects of English but also, in an OS X first, in several other languages. Text-to-speech voices are now available in Arabic, three different Chinese dialects, Czech, Danish, two varieties 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.’
Therefore Karen and Lee voices will work with Texthelp Read & Write V4 and Clicker 6 software as does the Alex voice! This is great news for all students and users who need high quality TTS on their Macs.
So many educators and speech and language pathologists have requested voices with Australian accents for modelling, pronunciation, clarity and as a user preference. They cater to students with LD and to anyone who needs a voice that is clear and accommodates their reading needs, vision loss, learning difference or intellectual impairment.
Read the article, follow the directions and then install the new voices (and there are many other voices in other languages). Note: They are large files and take a while to download so use a fast internet connection.

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My kind regards
Gerry