09 Feb 2006
A Most Vexing Conundrum
So Microsoft has released a preview soundbite of the new, super-cool text-to-speech voice that they will be including in Windows Vista, named ==Anna.== This is great, but there is a problem. I happen to think that the voice that comes with Mac OS X, named Vicki, sounds better.
You may think that you have heard Vicki before, when she was named Victoria, and has been around since approximately Mac OS 8 and MacInTalk Pro. However, Vicki was created entirely anew for Mac OS X 10.3, so while she sounds a lot like Victoria, she has higher quality samples.
There is only one way to settle this: with a poll.
Listen to these two samples, one of Anna, and one of Vicki, reading the same text:
Anna sample
Vicki sample
Sadly, I had to make Vicki read the same text as Anna’s sample, since Anna is not yet available to the general public.
The criticism I level against Anna is that she sounds too corporate, too stilted, and too electronic. The criticism Ben aims at Vicki is that she (like all MacInTalk voices) sounds like a synthetic pipe organ trying to emulate speech.
What do you think?