Category: Geeks r Us
Hello all,
I have a few questions about the RealSpeak voices from Scansoft.
First of all, I like to know when FreedomScientific started shipping their RealSpeak CDs?
The next question would be if the contents of the CDs for one given region were the same with all JAWS versions they were shipped with.
The interactive demo of scansoft.com lists the australian voice karen only as a part of the product named RealSpeak Telecom (in the demo it is named RS Host). If this information is correct, why can nextup.com and FreedomScientific distribute this voice? And why doesn't Scansoft give latest and correct product information on their own site? They are selling complete solutions with no apparent interest in the consumer market, but even a company can't get latest product info.
And my last questions are about JAWS 10 and the RealSpeak Solo Direct voices.
Can anyone please tell me why JAWS 10 uses the RS Direct voices instead of the open SAPI 5 voices? Why this limitation to customers?
And speaking of RS Solo Direct: Why can JAWS 10 customers have the British voice Serena when it is supposed to be a telephony voice? And why is this voice not available as a high quality (not 8KHZ)version to Scansoft's licensed distributors like NextUp.com and TextAloud, but only as a product that works exclusively with the latest FreedomScintific products and with nothing else?
I hope that someone of you has at least a few answers to my questions.
Regards,
Lord Raven
The realspeak voices aren't shipped, they're downloadable (if you use jaws 10.) The reason they aren't normal sapi voices is that they're supposed to be customized versions to work better with jaws. (AS a guess, just purely shooting in the dark, I'd also imagine that realspeak likes it this way as you can't just get their voices and not pay for them. Can't say as I really blame them a ton.)
For the record I'm just speaking of the jaws realspeak voices. I have not looked into the sapi realspeak voices that are not the jaws solo direct ones.
But that is the problem.
Until JAWS 10 FreedomScientific had an aggrement with Scansoft which allowed them to ship SAPI voices with JAWs 7 (am not sure), JAWS 8 and JAWS 9 troughout the world. The problem is that the new voices for JAWS 10 aren't SAPI voices, as you said. But this new distribution of voices contains at least one voice no one can buy as a SAPI voice.
There are a few companies out who are allowed to sell SAPI versions and they don't know anything about a third BRITISH voice.
Companies like Dolphin, Baum Retec AG and the owners of NextUp.com are allowed to sell SAPI voices to end users. But at least the people of nextup.com did not know that there was a third British voice out.
So, Does anyone know why this mess is out and where a end user could buy any or all scansoft voices in high quality as a SAPI 5 version?