The English-Teacher-in-Japan's Mac Toolbox 3 Hello again. Today I'd like to talk about speech software, that is, software that can make your Mac speak aloud.

If you've been around Macs for awhile, you already know that they are capable of speaking. You can choose a voice in the Speech preference panel (Apple menu-System Preferences-Speech-Text to Speech) from 23 options ranging from semi-human sounding to ridiculous. To hear your text spoken by the Mac, type it into Text Edit, highlight ("select") it, and click on Edit in the menu bar, go down to Speech and then to Start Speaking.

Fun, but perhaps not particularly useful. Unless you are disabled, or studying English as a second/foreign language, it's probably little more than a novelty.

Did you catch that? "Unless you are . . . studying English." It seems that no matter what language your Mac boots up in, Mac OSX can only speak English, unless you input, say, Spanish, words spelled as if they were American English. That seems to leave students of non-English languages out in the cold.

However. . .

A company called Create System Development has a software title called DTalker (Document Talker) which will speak Japanese! I discovered this title a couple of years ago, but I wish I had it a decade ago. One of the great frustrations of learning a language that uses pictograms (called Kanji in Japanese) as opposed to a phonetic "alphabet" is that you can't sound out the words when you see them. Aaarghh! But DTalker let's you hear most Kanji even if you don't understand them. DTalker will read aloud to you nearly any Japanese word, phrase, sentence or document that is on your Macintosh.

DTalker 2.1 does one thing only: it speaks Japanese. As far as I know, this is the only Japanese screen reader for the Mac. Once you have it set up, it will read from the Mac clipboard. Highlight some Japanese in a document, then go to the menu bar and click Edit, then Copy, and DTalker will read the selected text.

This is the main DTalker window. Except for the title, it's all in Japanese. That's a little frustrating, since this utility is obviously well-suited for learners of Japanese; a choice of interface languages would make life easier for non-Japanese users, and probably increase Create System's sales, too.

Type or Copy/Paste Japanese text into the window, press the play button and you'll hear it spoken aloud. Or, open (cmd-O) or drag a Japanese document to the window. Or, and this is the best, you can choose "Read Clipboard" (クリップボード読み上げ) from the center menu (読み上げ対像), and any Japanese you highlight and put into the clipboard by going to Edit-Copy or by the keyboard shortcut Command-C. In just about ANY PROGRAM, as long as DTalker is running in the background.

You can choose from 8 different voices, and each voice's settings allow you to adjust the pitch, speed and volume for that voice, along with a click box to choose whether DTalker should also read English words with a very Japanese accent, or pass them off to the Mac OS. (Getting to the setting panel is not intuitive: first click the Settings 設定 button under the picture, then click again directly on the picture to get there.)

There are a few annoyances in the program:

• no English interface option
• stuck at v2.1, and Mac development seems to have ceased
• cmd-H doesn't hide the program, must use the menu bar
• must turn on Read Clipboard setting every time you run DTalker (bring DTalker to the front and press Cmd-R)
• closing the DTalker window by clicking on the red button doesn't just close the window, it Quits the program

I hope that Mac development starts up again on this wonderful little program; the Windows version is updated regularly. Drop Create System a note asking them not to give up on DTalker for the Mac, if you're so inclined.

As I said, though, this is the only game in town, as far as I know. The advantage of not having to track someone down and ask every time I want to know a Japanese word's pronunciation, or (and this is a special kind of hell) look up the word in a Kanji dictionary. I know that it's a lot of money for a 1-act show, but to me DTalker 2.1 is worth the ¥7,980 at Amazon Japan. Unfortunately, I don't know of any source to buy this title outside of Japan. Amazon Jp doesn't ship this one overseas. Let me know if you have any information. Until next time . . .
_____  ¶ 10/08/2005 09:51:00 AM