[AssistiveWare News] Snow Leopard compatible Infovox iVox voices in public beta

[AssistiveWare Support]

Press release: Snow Leopard compatible Infovox iVox voices in public  
beta

Amsterdam - 28 August 2009 - Acapela Group and AssistiveWare today  
announced a public beta of Infovox iVox 2.0. Infovox iVox 2.0 brings  
Snow Leopard compatibility, significantly improves performance and  
responsiveness and adds a number of new voices for the following  
languages: Arabic, French, German, Flemish, Spanish, Brazilian  
Portuguese and Turkish. These voices work with virtually any Speech  
Manager compliant Mac OS X application, including VoiceOver, Preview,  
TextEdit, AssistiveWare VisioVoice, ConvenienceWare GhostReader, and  
Adobe Acrobat.

Infovox iVox 1.3, the currently shipping version, is not compatible  
with Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard". A complete rewrite of the core iVox  
speech engine was necessary to make Infovox iVox 64-bit compatible and  
ready for Snow Leopard. Despite the major engineering efforts, Infovox  
iVox 2.0 is offered as a free update in order to facilitate the  
migration to Snow Leopard for those people who rely on these natural  
sounding voices to use their computer.

Because of the large number of languages available in Infovox iVox,  
not all languages will be available immediately as part of the public  
beta. The first languages to be released will be American English,  
British English, French, German, Italian, Canadian French, Spanish,  
American Spanish, Swedish and Norwegian. More languages will follow in  
the coming weeks. Languages are made available in public beta step by  
step to allow for basic internal tests before a language is made  
available as part of the public beta.

Infovox iVox is Universal Binary and can be used on PowerPC and Intel  
Macs. The product includes all voices available for a language of  
choice. The following languages are available on Mac OS X 10.4 and  
later: American English, British English, American Spanish, Canadian  
French, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, Portuguese,  
Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish. The  
following languages require Mac OS X 10.5 and later: Arabic, Turkish,  
Czech, Greek, Russian and Polish. Due to the changes required for Snow  
Leopard, Icelandic is no longer supported.

For more information, a fully-functional downloadable demo and to  
listen to samples of the voices please consult the product page:

Infovox iVox: http://www.assistiveware.com/infovox_ivox.php

For more information contact AssistiveWare directly or one of our  
distributors such as Origin Instruments Corporation (http://orin.com)  
for North America or Kallysta (http://kallysta.com) for France.

This press release is also available at:
http://www.assistiveware.com/pr.php

AssistiveWare (http://www.assistiveware.com/) is the worldwide leader  
in innovative assistive technology software for Mac OS X and the  
iPhone. This includes award-winning KeyStrokes(R) and TouchStrokes(R)  
virtual keyboards, SwitchXS(R) scanning on-screen keyboard,  
LayoutKitchen(R) panel editor, and Proloquo(R) multi-purpose speech  
solution as well as the ground breaking Proloquo2Go communication  
solution for the iPhone and iPod touch. The ConvenienceWare product  
line (http://www.convenienceware.com) makes the advanced technologies  
developed by AssistiveWare available in cool and convenient  
applications that can make the life of Mac users easier.

Entirely dedicated to developing and deploying natural language  
interfaces, Acapela Group (http://www.acapela-group.com) is the  
European leader in speech solutions. Acapela Group speech solutions  
have already been deployed in many services and applications: voice  
portals, unified messaging services, CRM and contact centers, talking  
web, interactive games, edutainment software, e-learning tools, public  
address, assistive tools for the disabled, navigation aid, embedded  
systems, and much more.

AssistiveWare and ConvenienceWare are trade names of AssistiveWare BV  
and trademarks or registered trademarks of Niemeijer Consult.  
VisioVoice, SwitchXS, KeyStrokes, TouchStrokes, LayoutKitchen,  
GhostReader, Proloquo, and Proloquo2Go are trademarks or registered  
trademarks of Niemeijer Consult. Infovox iVox is a trademark of  
Acapela Group. All other trademarks are properties of their respective  
owners.