Update:

The software used for this type of communication is built into the Mac OS as the speech function. You can use this function to read text in Word or text pad.

If you caught the episode of Oprah with Roger Ebert then you might have heard his new voice. After four years of not being able to use his voice due to being diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Sun-Times critic appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to debut the fruit of some Scottish computer programmers’ labour, a voice that actually sounds like him. If you can imagine not having a voice a voice that was his bread and butter as a movie reviewer on television Roger has overcome his disability. With the help of his Mac Book and software he can now communicate with the world. If you have ever used a program like MacSpeech then you are familiar to the type of software that Roger Ebert is using to communicate. He is not the first to use computer speech to communicate, but he certainly is a poster boy for what technology can do for people with a speech problem. The technology that allows people speak through their computers has also gone down in price. You just need a computer and software which would run about $1200 something that was once out of reach for many. This technology has also made it easy for anyone to communicate and get work done that was once impossible. You can dictate your blog posts as you watch TV or read the newspaper. The software has improved over the years from my early start with programs like Dragon Dictate to super programs like MacSpeech. In the early days it took a very long time to teach the software to understand what you were saying and there were mixed results when speech converted to text. The new programs are almost perfect and understand more accents and pronunciation. Even my cell phone has speech recognition software. The effort of all the speech recognition programs must be noted as this technology is often forgotten or ignored even though there is so much value in what it can do.