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DESCRIPTION
GhostReader (formerly TextParrot) is a multilingual text-to-speech solution for Mac OS X that allows you to listen to your documents with naturally sounding voices in a language of choice. Voices are currently available for the following languages: American English, British English, Czech, Finnish, French, Canadian French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, American Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Russian and Swedish. GhostReader itself is localized in English, French, Italian and German.
Use it:
Save time
- Convert documents to audiobooks to listen to on an iPod or iPhone.
- Convert text from news sites and emails to audiobooks to listen to on an iPod or iPhone.
Overcome reading difficulties
- Listen to selected text in any application with word or sentence highlighting.
- Point the cursor at text in Safari, TextEdit, Mail or Pages 2008 to hear the paragraph below the cursor.
Proofread
- Listen to your own text to proof spelling and composition.
Improve pronunciation of foreign languages
- Listen to text on foreign web sites in an interactive reader window.
- Type foreign text in a new reader window to hear the pronunciation.
Create podcasts
- Create personal podcasts by converting your text to audio files or iTunes tracks.
WHAT'S NEW
Version 1.6:
- New voice languages: Arabic, Greek, Russian.
- New high quality voices for existing languages: Italian male voice, Turkish female voice, British female voice, Norwegian male voice.
- Compatibility with Safari 4.
- New localization: Italian.
REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
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| GhostReader User Reviews (10 posts) | Write A Review |
 | Dec 7 2007 |
K0GG I'm totally delighted that I bought GhostReader. It reads superbly well with Leopard's Alex voice. It's great for reading webpages when I'm tired of reading them myself. I've set it to read the text under my cursor when I press the Control key. GhostReader is extremely useful for proof-reading emails and forum text entries before I post them. It picks up correctly spelled words that are the wrong word in context--like 'no' instead of 'on' which I easily overlook.
(Version 1.1.1) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
 | Oct 29 2007 |
ROBIN-O-HOOD Does Leopard have Improved Text-Speaking? YES it does! Here's a *Sample Leopard Recording* (from daringfireball.net) to compare with: http://daringfireball.net/misc/2007/10/Alex-Text-to-Speech-Example.mp3 http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/october
(Version 1.1.1) | |
| [ Reply ] | |
| Jul 11 2007 |
OK14ME21 This is just a "Must Have" program !!!! I love to give it 10 stars out of 5 - if I could ! I have been waiting for more than 10 years to find it ! But as a Swedish citizen I am displeased that my computer can not speak text in my own language ;-( People from America and England do not have this problem with there Mac's - but the rest of the world do suffer from this problem !!!! GhostReader is the ultimate solution !!!!! For those who love to hear text been spoken in their own language with high quality voices - for example Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Flemish and moreŠ.. You must download the voices for your country to use GhostReader ! I just love to hear my favorite author been spoken with a synthetic voice ;-) And to all of you out there - follow these simple rules: Download Application and your Voices. .....And You Will Be Sold !!!!!!
(Version 1.1) | |
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| Jan 30 2007 |
PATOCHE Very good soft, I like it a lot. The french voices are sympathiques and stress on the punctuation is correctly made usually. One problem with the purchase on the US store it is listed ŕ 39 us dollars and on the wwide store at 49.-- for a dowloaded product, why ? I will not buy it for this reason, for the moment. Of course I live in europe...
(Version 1.0.1) | |
| [ 2 Replies - Reply ] | |
Replies:
 | Feb 26 2007 |
DAVIDN The price in euros is 39, not 49. In the world wide store prices are based on Euros, in the North American store on USD. The product cost $39 or 39 euro. Due to exchange rate fluctuations prices in other than the stores default currency may vary. The reason for the two stores is that TextParrot includes voices which we license from another company and we are not allowed to sell those for the dollar price outside of North America.
(Version 1.0.1) | |
| Jul 5 2007 |
AVETENEBRAE but $39 is more 29€ than 39… ;)
(Version 1.1) | |
| Dec 13 2006 |
PHALERON This is not a fair evaluation with it being the first version, but here we go: The voices are certainly better than Apple's, but the accent is often placed on the wrong syllable (although the word is spelled correctly) and sometimes it is mispronounced. For instance "spellchecking' is pronounced "spellkecking." Incidentally, I could not find spellchecking. Neither could I drag text selections around. I also found it to be a problem that when text is read on another application (e.g. Safari) and a text box opens with the selected text that is read-out, the user cannot then go to another window, or else the box closes and the reading stops. As a result one has to refrain from all work while the text is being read. On the positive side, I really like the voices. The places where TextParrot runs smooth, it is a joy to listen. Playing the fast-forward is surprisingly comprehensible (maybe even preferable). Much, much work has to be done to get this program to be smooth, but in my opinion they are already ahead of the competition. Good luck!
(Version 1.0) | |
| [ 1 Reply - Reply ] | |
Replies:
 | Sep 19 2007 |
MACOLYTE Check out SpiritedAway, which does auto app switching, but also lets you designate apps to keep active when in the background. Should solve the 'have to stay in the app' problem
(Version 1.1.1) | |
| Dec 13 2006 |
NIAMOR It's quite difficult to find a good voice synth for french language. Maybe impossible... And these are not so bad. The 4 french voices sound almost natural, but there are a lot of bugs with the timing, punctuation, abbreviation... Then, it becomes quickly unbearable ! However, it should be usefull with a applescript support... but none at this time..
(Version 1.0) | |
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| Dec 12 2006 |
ZANGIEF Nothing the Mac OS and the application Orator (freeware) can't do. A waste of time and money.
(Version 1.0) | |
| [ 1 Reply - Reply ] | |
Replies:
| Dec 13 2006 |
MIKURO Orator uses the standard system text-to-speech, which...well, let's face it, it sucks. It doesn't sound remotely natural. It's barely better than what we had a decade ago. I have not used TextParrot yet, but I assume from the description (and download size!) that it uses its own voice synthesizers.
(Version 1.0) | |
| Dec 12 2006 |
MEATMCGUFFIN Is this anything to do with the DOS talking parrot? Good times, i remember playing with that in my childhood!
(Version 1.0) | |
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| Dec 12 2006 |
What makes it so large?
(Version 1.0) | |
| [ 1 Reply - Reply ] | |
Replies:
| Jun 6 2007 |
CASCADEHUSH The files are large because they contain the voice data. High quality voices for TTS applications are typically larger than 100MB. If the voices are as good as they say, then the product is worth the price for the voices along. Personally I'm still searching and haven't evaluated this product yet.
(Version 1.0.1) | |
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