pVoice

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pVoice is an application for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).Disabled people who cannot speak and have very little possiblities to operate a computer can use pVoice by selecting photo’s or symbols to generate speech output.

Common symbol languages like PCS, Bliss or ‘Vijfhoek’ can be used with pVoice. You need to purchase these symbol-libraries from the respective manufacturers though.

pVoice is available in English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Russian, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese (the free Text To Speech ‘engine’ is not available for all of these languages, see the Microsoft Agent page) and is distributed with an emtpy database. You’ll have to define your own Themes (categories) and symbols representing words within these themes. This however is an easy task.

The pVoice installer will -depending on the components you select- use your internetconnection to download nessecary components. If you want to install pVoice on a standalone PC, you can first download all neccesary components (see the Microsoft Agent page for this) and install them on the target PC. When you start the pVoice installer on that machine, it will detect already installed components and it won’t try to download it again.

Changes in pVoice 2.2 beta 5 compared to pVoice 2.1:

New ’roundcornered’ look and feel
More input possibilities (single switch operation, keyboard and touchscreen combined with the input possibilities of pVoice 2.1, namely mousebuttons and the headsupport of the Adremo powered wheelchair)
Possibility to load different datafiles (vocabularies)
Numerous improvements in the ‘editmode’, amongst which remembering the settings of previously created themes
Buttons can now contain text-only (images are optional)
You no longer need to have Administrator rights on Windows XP/NT/2000 to use pVoice
Support for Microsoft SAPI4 en SAPI5 speech synthesizers (the Microsoft Agent is now optional)
Support for a lot more image fileformats, amongst which (transparent) PNG, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, WMF, EMF, PCX, TGA, BMP, ICO and SVG
Support for plugins