Captivate 6, Text-To-Speech: No German voice?!?

[ok1024]

My company just bought the upgrade from Captivate 5.5 to Captivate 6. After installing Captivate 6 as well as the additional speech package there is no German voice ("Stefan") available anymore in the "Speech Agent" droplist ("Speech Management" dialog)!?

This function is crucial for us since all our software demos are published in German and English.

Is there another speech package I have to install or what can I do?

Thanks,

Olaf

[JP Cornelissen]

Hi Olaf,

Did you find a German voice for Captivate 6?

I searched the web and came across the below pages.
I found that Captivate 6 does not support a Loquendo anymore, but didn't find an alternative yet. Did you?

• Install text to speech converters for Captivate 6
  http://help.adobe.com/en_US/captivate/cp/using/WS5b3ccc516d4fbf351e63e3d119e9582190-7fd8.html#WSc1b8...
• Loquende support in Captivate 6
  http://captivate.adobe.com/captivate/topics/loquende_support_in_captivate_6
• Adobe Captivate 5 text-to-speech converters
  http://helpx.adobe.com/captivate/kb/captivate-5-text-speech-converters.html

[ok1024]

Hi John-Pierre,

No, I didn't find a German voice for Captivate 6. I have talked to several members of the Adobe support staff (in Germany and the US) and the answer was always the same:

"Regarding the question, german voices are not available with Cp 6. You will not be able to use Cp 5.5 voices with 6.  You can however get any third party voices but we havent tested them at Adobe and we might not be able to support them."

That does not sound very encouraging, does it? After wasting several additional hours on browsing support forums I gave up.

I've decided to record my own voice (which is still available in German).

Olaf

[JP Cornelissen]

Thank you Olaf,

Mmm, that means I'll have to convince someone in my company to purchase a German voice then...

Thanks,

JP

[JP Cornelissen]

Hi,

Ok, I did some more research for Germen voices too and in the end I found that only http://www.cereproc.com could provide voices that work with Adobe Captrivate 6.

• http://www.ivona.com: I installed the demo and Captivate 6 does see the voices and allows you to assign them to the TTS sentences. However, when it comes to generating the audio, Captivate picks up the voice that is selected in the control panel » speech section. That's fine if you need a single voice in your project, but if you want a dialog between two or more persons then you have a problem. I have sent an email to query their support for a solution but did not receive a reply.
• http://www.neospeech.com: I have seen topics here in the forum where people say it works. Unfortunately they have very few voices and German is not one of them.
• http://www.loquendo.com: I believe this is the provider of the English voices that come with Captivate 6. I searched their website for a demo or a store to purchase more voices and I couldn't find it. I only found a few pages that say they are now part of Nuance with a broken link to their TTS solutions.
• http://www.nuance.com: like Loquendo, I can't find any page with a TTS demo or a store to purchase more voices. I have sent them an email weeks ago and never received a reply.
• http://www.acapela-group.com: you can't buy from them directly, their website sends you to third party resellers. I visited the website of 2 resellers in my country (Netherlands) but again, I couldn't find a page with a demo or store to purchase.

So, the only provider left for me is http://www.cereproc.com. On their website you can quicly find, purchase and download a voice. All you need to do then is install the voice, enter the license and (re-)start Captivate.

Hope this helps

John-Pierre Cornelissen