Text-to-speech for international versions of the Mac OS

The Mac's text-to-speech abilities work only with English and Spanish, leaving users of other languages to seek a third-party alternative. Petra Holmström shares her successful search for a text-to-speech utility that works with her native Swedish and other languages. She writes: "Telia Promotor, a division of the Swedish telecom company Telia, specializes in making speech synthesizers. Until recently the best version they made for the Mac was Infovox 210, which was expensive and sounded worse than Apple's own text-to-speech. But they offered more language choices than Apple. Several years ago Telia Promotor developed a new type of speech synthesizer for the Wintel market. The new method was to use diphon (whole words instead of trying to pronounce each letter into a word) which gave a more natural speech pattern. Since I'm voice handicapped I was devastated because my only options were to use the mediocre Infovox 210 or change to Windows. Instead I started to collect names. In 5 months I gathered 907 names that I sent to Telia Promotor, asking for a Mac update. And now they have released Infovox 310, which I have found to be a big improvement over the old version." The Infovox Web site has a 30-day demo with support for Danish, German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, and Swedish. Update: Orjan Larsson adds: "The Infovox 310 does also support English, British-English."