Replacing VOCA with a Laptop?

tomschuring asks: "A friend of mine has Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and because of it, he is using a Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA). When I heard the quality speech of the portable device I was less than impressed. My Mac is much better at it and at least has a few different voices (like one with an English accent) to choose from. Has anybody used a laptop for this purpose? What text to speech engine are you using and what are our impressions? Is there predictive text software available for this purpose? Is the startup time and battery time acceptable for this sort of application?"

Comments

engineering

[jeif1k]

Engineering involves many tradeoffs. In this case, voice quality is only one desirable feature; battery life, size, cost, human factors, support, robustness, etc., are others. You may be able to do better with a laptop or you may not; but don't assume that just because your laptop has a better text-to-speech system it is overall better at the task.

pVoice

[Kalak]

You didn't mention specific features, and VOCAs come in a wide variety of special features. With this in mind, there is one thing to consider that dedicated VOCAs have over notebooks. The ones I have seen (for my daughter, now 6) are built for abuse. Not abuse in the laptop sense, but abuse as in get dropped from a few feet, have stuff spilled on them sense. This is one reason for their pricetag

With that in mind, if a notebook is fair game, you should look at pVoice. It is open in design (and open source) as well as being free in cost. It was created by a father for his daugher who is a spastic quadraplegic, and the labor of love shows.