By Ekaj, 29 January, 2014
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Hey everyone. This isn't necessarily a problem for me, but merely a curious bug perhaps? I've been going through all the free voices available for my Mac, and trying them out. These include the ones available from Nuance, or whatever they're calling themselves now. I seem to be missing Sangeeta and Emily. I think those are the only 2 that have gone missing, but there may be more. I've checked everywhere in the Voices tab of the Speech category in the Voiceover Utility, but can't find them. When I say Emily I'm referring to the British-English voice, not the French one. Again this hasn't presented a problem, but if someone could shed some light on this I'd appreciate it. I was at my parents' house over the weekend, and a sister of mine helped me install all necessary software updates. I'm going to check for more in a bit but thought I'd post here first.
Comments
missing some voices
Re: Missing Some Voices
Have you tried typing in the search field?
a helpful hint
Re: A Helpful Hint
Some voices no longer available for download under Mavericks
Jake, if you are comparing the voices that were available for download before Mavericks, there are indeed some voices that are no longer available, as well as a number of new voices that are available in each language. The voices that are no longer available for download under Mavericks include Sangeeta and the British English voice, Emily, that you list as being missing. If you are still running an earlier version of the operating system, such as Lion (Mac OS X 10.7), when these voices first became available, or Mountain Lion, you may still be able to download and use these voices.
The difference in available voices under Mavericks is more evident for some other languages, like Arabic, Hungarian, Greek, Norwegian, or Finnish, where the only available voice or voices completely changed. I believe this is related to which voices Nuance is willing to currently support and continue to support in the latests versions of both the Mac and iOS operating systems. There are about two dozen voices in various languages that are no longer downloadable under Mavericks, so this change is noticeable for people who use voices in multiple languages, and has been discussed on some of the Mac lists, like this recent thread about voice changes after the Mavericks upgrade on the Macvisionaries list.
I've linked you to the Mail Archive post for the start of the thread. The Mail Archive supports access key navigation in web browsers, so if you are reading in Safari press Control+n to navigate to the next post in the thread and Control+p to naviagate to the previous post in the thread. Other web browser/operating systems should replace the Control key with the appropriate access key combination for that platform (e.g., use Alt+n and Alt+p in Internet Explorer). To summarize, it may be possible to move over copies of the missing voices and use them under Mavericks if you have access to an older installation of the operating system with the downloaded voices, and are comfortable working the Terminal command line and also understand the organization of System files, but this is probably not something you want to try as a relatively new user. Another post you might want to read is the AppleVis forum discussion post Explanation to all of you who are confused about the voices in iOS 7. While that post is about iOS 7, one of the issues is that Apple has been merging iOS and the Mac OS into a common interface. My guess is that some of the Voice changes come from what Nuance is willing to keep supporting under Mac OS, as well.
Before Lion, Mac users who used voices in other languages purchased these voices, generally from Assistiveware, who marketed the Acapela group's voices as Infovox/iVox voices. Assistiveware put a lot of extra effort into making sure these voices worked stably with VoiceOver as system voices. Because of VoiceOver's integration throughout the Mac operating system, stability in using voices for generall operations, as opposed to just text to speech reading purposes, is a lot more difficult to achieve. The experience of trying to use other commercial TTS voices from Cepstral or Cereproc, was generally that they would make VoiceOver crash or hang, and so VoiceOver users eventually disabled them. I don't know of any extensive testing of other paid third-party voice options since Lion that would point to good, stable voices for VoiceOver without additional evidence that the manufacturer was willing to work on and support integration with VoiceOver on the Mac and in iOS.
HTH. Esther