Jan 00 Getting Started
Volume Number: 16
Issue Number: 1
Column Tag: Getting Started
by Dan Parks Sydow
An introduction to including speech in a Macintosh
program
In February and March of last year, Getting Started discussed how a Macintosh
program plays pre-recorded digitized sounds. In April's article we looked at how a
program can record and later play back sounds - including speech. But there's another
way - an easier and disk space-saving way - to give your Mac application speech
capabilities. This month we'll look at the Speech Manager and how its functions allow
your program to easily generate spoken words. In the example program you'll see that
the words that are to be spoken can be supplied in a variety of ways: either by
hard-coding them in your program, including them in strings in a resource, or by
allowing the user to enter them.
Speech Basics
A program that includes the ability to generate synthesized speech - speech that
results from the conversion of text to spoken sound - uses the Speech Manager. The
Speech Manager accomplishes this with the assistance of a speech synthesizer. The
Speech Manager passes text to a synthesizer. It is the synthesizer's built-in
dictionaries and sets of pronunciation rules that enable text to be processed and turned
into recognizable speech. After the synthesizer does its job, it passes_the converted