Thanks for the update there enes. Just out of curiosity, where did you find info about this? I've been monitoring all the major technology sites that I know of, closely following build.

About the voices, they're a vast vast improvement over anna in windows 7 but it still can't beat Alex in snow leopard.

Those sound good compared to what we have in Vista and 7, and especially XP and before interns of voice. However, a fundamental question of mine is still yet unanswered: Will the Accessibility feats be available in the WRE? Can you boot from the CD and have it talk on at least some systems?

hi,
next year this time it will be released
and just found these voices lying around

@arqmeister: I'm almost certain that jaws 13 won't be able to run on windows 8 properly. Unless they totally rewrite a major part of jaws so that it no longer relies on the freedomscientific mirror display driver before the final release of jaws 13, jaws 13 will probably just be a glorified screen reader. Don't take my word for it though. Hm; come to think of it, other screen readers who rely heavily on any mirror drivers like window-eyes will be in the same boat. Does anyone know if Hal uses a mirror driver? Am just curious. I'm sure that freedomscientific will find a way to get jaws 14 to work properly in windows 8 though by next year.

@PaulieD: So far, the developer preview (as far as I'm aware) does not yet have this feature but you never know; microsoft might surprise us. Afterall, we're still a year away from a final release. The things that I've been hearing about the improvements made to narator are promising and it seems to me that microsoft is trying to compete with apple with regards to built-in accessibility.

Well, the new Narrator is just a copy of Apples Voiceover. I'm not saying this just because I'm an Apple fan, but just wait and see. It really works the same way...

Its pretty similar to voice over, though its still too early to make a definite comparison. After all, the betas aren't out yet, much less the release candidates.

Hi,

There is a MS Speech Server + Voices on the Microsoft Website. Enter something like "Speech platform 12" (I think 12 is the latest) in the search box, should be one of the first results you'll find.

Hi,

You do have to use the X86 version. At first I tried the X64 version, but this failed horribly.
Well, I wasn't sure if 11 or 12 was the latest version. Somehow I remember installing version 12 sometime earlier this month, but again I could be wrong.
I'm not that impressed with them though. At first the voices were of poor quality, and now they seem to have some SpeechInterupt issues. Not sure if this has been fixed yet or if it's something to do with the SynthDriver for NVDA, as it's the only thing I tested it with.

Hi,

Haha~
It made me smile. Now: the issues I was mentioning:
- In the older versions of said platform, the voices seemed to be stuck at 8KHZ for some odd reason. This is improoved.
- Now: Let's imagine I use it in NVDA. Tabbing through dialogs at a very fast rate. Sometimes it gets stuck and finishes reading before suddenly jumping ahead to the current control it was supposed to interupt and speak before.
Not sure if this made any sense, but that's my experiences with it.

Hi,
Ok, I have to ask: why did yu siply quote a post in your post/ That is a waste of our time to check out a topic when there is not anythng new.

It works fine! These voices are awesome!

I, too, have noticed a small lag in them though. Is this an NVDA issue?as

Not to mention they have some serius pronounciation issues.
The british one can't say synthesizer dialog. It actually says synfsizer die aalig. something like that anyway.
And in v11 of the platform they became considerably less responsive. IDK why that is, but it's the case.