Welcome to Speech Pack, the external package for 4th Dimension which adds Text-to-Speech capabilities to your data-bases! Don't display just a message but talk to your user. What kind of interaction is more natural? And the quality of the voices is also pretty good these days.
This external package uses the Speech Manager which is installed by the Speech Manager extension from Apple. It allows you to let your Macintosh read out the text you specify.
By using this external package you are able to add a great new ability to your data-bases. Apple has really created an exciting piece of software, and for me it is/was a thrill to be able to provide these abilities to 4D Developers as well.
As soon as I got the Speech Manager I started working on this project. It took me one day and two evenings to experiment (without any documentation) and put the first released beta-version (1.0b2) together. After I obtained the documentation a full Friday evening was used to plan the functions and commands to provide asynchronuous speech with version 2.0. Then a full Saturday until late in the evening to write it and do some basic testing. The next Sunday was spent debuging, fine-tuning, writing the documentation etc. Since then an increasing number of beta-testers has worked with it and a large number of features were added and bugs fixed.
Speech Pack is now shareware. Although I did receive some postcards and even a $40 payment, I have the impression either nobody uses it or nobody sends in his/her postcard like I previously requested. Perhaps making it shareware convinces you this is not just a toy you and I are playing with, but a serious piece of software.
You may try this external for a period of 30 days. If you decide to keep it, you will need to send in your registration form and shareware fee. See the ”Legal Stuff & Registration“ chapter for more information.
Until your registration form has been received you will hear a shareware reminder whenever the data-base starts up.
Please be aware this shareware fee and registration only applies to non-commercial, in-door, private use. Including it with other software for sale, or frequent use for demonstrations, is strictly forbidden without prior permission of the author.
Use the External Mover (Plus) to install this external package. See the External Mover documentation for more details on how to do this.
