Veddy British

It's always been a sci-fi conceit to have the computer talk with a perfect, natural-sounding speaking voice, and so far all we've had are the usual halting, phoneme-mangling robotic voices bu ilt into the operating system. There hasn't yet been the smooth, soothing menac e of HAL, the business-like LCARS computer vo ice of the Starship Enterprise, or the prissy Brit butler accent of C3PO. Instead we get Vicki, Bruce or Zarvox. At least one company has been trying hard to accomplish this difficult feat, an d they're closer to it as anyone has been, and that's Infovox iVox, from the Acapela Group and AssistiveWare. They have been providing wonderfu l voices, in many languages, for use with any software compliant with Mac OS X' s Speech Manager, like TextEdit, Prev iew or Adobe Acrobat, or even Tiger's VoiceOv er screen reader feature. Notable in iVox are the Lucy and Graham voices, which eerily sound like something you'd hear from a space ship computer. Well, the company is releasing a new British voice named Peter, which I imagine would sound real cool when it tells you the hour on the hour. This w ill be in addition to the many existing accented voices ranging from American t o Flemish (eh?). Peter is included in the British voice pack which sells for 99 Euros. Existing owners get Peter as a free upgrade. If you're curious, there's a fully functioning demo available here.