Educational speech solutions: One Mac, One Voice !

Acapela Group and AssistiveWare have launched a number of new educational packages for their Mac OS X speech solutions.

Infovox iVox, the natural sounding voices that work with any Speech Manager compliant Mac OS X application and TextParrot, the powerful but affordable document and selection reader have made a profound impact in the classroom since their release last year. From today, lab and school licenses will be available to teachers and students at all levels of education, improving their access to the software.



In addition, Acapela Group and AssistiveWare have worked closely with the leaders in educational software, Kurzweil Educational Systems in the US and TextHelp Systems in the UK, to ensure that their upcoming software is fully compatible with Infovox iVox. Kurzweil 3000 for Macintosh version 3.0.4 and 4.0, along with TextHelp's Read and Write Gold for Mac version 2.1.0, due for release in late June, are also fully compatible with Infovox iVox. This means that teachers can now use this best-of-breed software along with the cutting edge Infovox iVox voices to enhance the learning experiences of their students.



Educational licenses for TextParrot and Infovox iVox are for internal educational use. For school licenses they permit use by all students and teachers in the school with installation on up to 150 computers. For classroom licenses they permit use in one specific classroom or computer lab with installation on up to 50 computers. Educational licenses do not allow publication of audio files outside the classroom or school.



Schools interested in producing audio files for publishing should contact Acapela Group directly. To install the software on more then the maximum number of permitted computers, multiple classroom or school licences may be purchased. In the case of colleges or universities, a department, chair, or building is considered equivalent to a school.



Both Infovox iVox and TextParrot are Universal Binary enabled and can be used on either PowerPC or Intel Macs. The products include a wide range of natural sounding voices in several languages: US English, UK English, French, Canadian French, German, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, American Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.



A fully functional downloadable demo and voice samples are available at the following website: Infovox iVox: http://www.assistiveware.com/infovox_ivox.php TextParrot: http://www.convenienceware.com/textparrot.php



For more information contact AssistiveWare directly or one of AssistiveWare's distributors such as Origin Instruments Corporation (http://orin.com) for North America or ordiTICE (http://orditice.com) for France.