This World Wide Web page can talk and sing! You can make it STOP talking by holding down the 'esc' key.
This Web page uses a Netscape plug-in named "Talker", and Apple Computer's PlainTalk Speech Synthesis technology, to speak.
The new release of the Talker plug-in, version 2.0, lets web pages talk in many voices. Some voices sound like robots. One can whisper. Some voices can sing songs. And there is even one voice that can laugh hysterically.
In addition to being fun, and useful to web surfers with visual impairments, speech generated using speech-synthesis technology requires much less network bandwidth than recorded audio.
Look below to find links to a growing list of other talking and singing web sites.
For a very nice Japanese translation of these Talker instructions, and pages that Talk and sing in Japanese, please click here. The Japanese Talker pages were created by Naotaka Morimoto.
You are the 199,399th person to visit this page since March 27, 1996.
NOTE: If you have a control panel named "Speech" in your Control Panels folder and files like "Kathy" and "Ralph" in the Voices folder inside your Extensions folder, then you already have all or most of Apple's "English Text-to-Speech" software installed, so you can skip the next step if you like. But you might want to do the next step anyway, to be sure you have the latest available version fully installed.
You can also download Apple's "Mexican Spanish Text-to-Speech" software from Apple's site. This installer is around 2.8MB. After installing it, your Mac will be able to talk in Spanish! The Spanish text-to-speech software runs on all 33MHz 68030 and faster Macs (including Power Macs).
You Power Mac users can also download and install Apple's latest English Speech Recognition software. (It's much more robust than it was a year ago.) You can download it from Apple's site. To use Apple's speech recognition software you need a Power Mac computer with 16-bit sound in (most of them have that) and a PlainTalk microphone (or compatible mic, like the ones built into most of Apple's AV monitors). The Speech Recognition software allows your computer to respond to spoken commands! It includes several pre-made commands like "Open the extensions folder", "What time is it?", and "Tell me a joke". And you can add new commands simply by creating aliases to files, folders, applications, or AppleScripts. The Talker plug-in does not use the speech recognition software, but a couple other plug-ins do. They are listed near the bottom of this web page.
After installing Apple's "English Text-to-Speech" software and rebooting, and after downloading the Talker plug-in and putting it in the "plug-ins" folder with your Netscape application, you should be able to open Netscape 2.0, navigate to this web page, and hear it talk to you!
If you have version 1.4 or later of Apple's English Text-to-Speech installed on a Mac running System 7.1 or later, you can use the "Speech" control panel that comes with Apple Computer's text-to-speech software to change the default voice: Open the Speech control panel, go to the "Voices" options, and choose the voice you want to hear. The next time you visit a Talking page, it will speak in that voice. Try out voices like "Whisper" and "Good News"! You can find version 1.4.1 of Apple's English Text-to-Speech and Spanish Text-to-Speech software on Apple's site.
Bill Noon's ListenUp plug-in (a Netscape plug-in)...and...
Digitial Dream's ShockTalk (a ShockWave plug-in).
