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>>THIS INFO IS FOR SPEAKING CLOCK DELUXE ONLY, WHICH IS NO LONGER DEVELOPED<<
Note: These instructions assumes you have already installed speech engines.
Speech technology
There are two main techniques to provide a speaking clock. One is to use real samples of the human voice, and one is to use a text-to-speech engine with synthesized speech:
- Using real samples ("natural speech") results in speech that is very natural, because what you hear is a real human voice, recorded and sampled into digital sound. Using sampled voices, the clock can announce the time perfectly in any language. So far, appr. 25 languages are available, most of them recorded by native speakers of the language.
- Using text-to-speech engines results in a more synthetic speech. However, the technology has advanced considerably and the output is very good. The major advantage of this technology is that the clock can say anything, including the alarm reminders and quotes.
Enable speech synthesis
First of all, if you recently installed speech support, make sure you restart the clock. Then open the settings dialog, and choose the Speech tab. Click the "Enable text-to-speech" checkbox and then choose a voice from the list.
What can you do with text-to-speech?
You can tell the clock to announce the time with speech synthesis. Open the settings dialog and choose the "Time telling" tab. There you can choose between speech synthesis and "natural speech".
With speech synthesis you can have the computer say you alarm alert text, this option is available in the Alarm setup dialog.
Last but not least you can use your computer to read any text that you have copied to the clipboard. Open the Settings dialog, choose the "Speech" tab and enable the clipboard reader. Then copy any text from any program (like Word or Outlook) to the clipboard, by simply highlighting it and pressing Ctrl-C. Finally press Ctrl-Alt-R and the text will be read by the selected speech engine.
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