Hate Fred and Veronica? Try David and Linda

I prefer my Macs to be seen and not heard, but for those of you who use Text-To-Speech (TTS), some new voices are in order.

Let's face it... Fred and Veronica suck. They are unlistenable as far as I am concerned. Fortunately,
Cepstral builds high quality, natural sounding voices that I can tolerate.
Cepstral's software voices are available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, even Solaris. They currently offer 18 voices in 6 different languages. David, the newest voice, is optimized for reading news and browser content and all the voices integrate seamlessly with Apple's Speech Manager. The voices are free to try, $30 to buy.

Head on over to Cepstral's demo page to hear David's soothing radio voice, the bold and beautiful Emily, Duncan the Scottish man of mystery (no relation), the very French Isabelle, devilish Damien, the child-like Robin and all their synthesized friends. [tip: I couldn't get any of the demos to play in Safari or Firefox without clicking on the direct link to the WAV file.]

Maybe now I'll let my Mac talk back without cringing.