EasySpeak - 1.2

At least in Tiger, this program quits on launch; it bounces a few times in the dock and dies.

What I don't like about EasySpeak is that it provides zero control over your chosen voice. Therefore you get the slow monotonous speed of speech that is the default in Mac OS X. I personally cannot stand it. I demand being able to speed up voices so that my listening is more efficient. All to the alternative applications allow this. So this is a big mark against bothering with EasySpeak (so far).

As to the very stoopid question about what this application is for, since you 'can do the same thing in Mac OS X' blahblahblah: NO YOU CAN'T you dummy. Try the software before you slam it!

The great thing about all these type of speech apps is that you can SAVE THE SPEECH TO A SOUND FILE and then use it for whatever you like. In the case of EasySpeak you only get the choice of an AIFF file, but that's just fine. Immediately I can toss the file into my ~/Library/Sounds folder and choose to use it for whatever I like. In Mail I created a sound to tell me "You have new electric mail'. In iCal I have sounds that say to me 'You have and appointment', 'Imminent birthday alert!', 'It's your anniversary', etc. If you want to go ultra-crazy you can get Xounds from Unsanity (only works through MOSX Tiger - so far).

The other applications that do the same thing as EasySpeak, only BETTER are:

<b>iSpeak It</b> - Brilliant little app, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, but costs you $20.

<b>Vox Machina</b> - Not recommended as it is nearly impossible to choose what voice you want due to a MAJOR long standing bug. Otherwise it's quite nice, and FREE.

<b>Say</b> - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED because it's FREE, works directly with your Mac OS X Speech settings, and provides flexibility in what sound format you save to. (To speak and save the sound simply use the command for speaking you setup in the Speech Preference pane).

<b>Narrator</b> - Costs you $19. It's limitation is that you can't save your results to a sound file. It's niffy kewl features are that you can create a script with as many voices as you have installed, and you can do some thing extraordinary with your voices: change the 'inflection', aka modulation, of each voice. This feature has been built into Plaintalk since day one. The only two applications that are smart enough to use it are Tex-Edit Plus (highly recommended) and Narrator. A solution to the inability to save to sounds is to use a sound capture app like Audio Hijack or WireTap.

I am not sure what the purpose of this little app is other than to add additional steps for using the "Text to Speech" function that is already built into all Macs. A simple "command+A" will select all the text in the active window, or you can highlight a selected portion, and "command+S" will initiate the text to speech engine to speak the selected text if you have "Text to Speech" turned on in System Preferences in the "Speech" preference window. Entering "command+S" while the text is being spoken will stop it. You only have to activate "Text to Speech" in the System Preferences to have full text to speech capabilities on your machine, and no third party apps are needed to use it.

Ron