In case anyone didn't notice, Google added Japanese support in December or so: http://asiajin.com/blog/2010/12/18/googl...-japanese/

Korean also.

I see in the comments they mention: http://text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/speech.asp - Which seems to use Neospeech's Misaki voice engine.

Edit: I see Bokusenou already touched on this stuff in another thread. I'm too slow!

Seems a lot worse than I remember Misaki being.

Related: OSX lion will include Japanese (and Chinese and Korean) text to speech.

At the moment Google's looks pretty limited to a relatively few words.

Were you referring to imtranslator's rendering? I assume that's the difference (didn't listen to a lengthier piece)—if one hypothetically used the Misaki engine with a standalone TTS program it might sound better?

I was reading some interesting article that talks about the ways OSX and iOS are on a kind of spectrum and OSX is becoming in ways more like iOS?

I saw screenshots of Windows 8 recently. No idea if they were real, but I noticed very large buttons. Maybe it's becoming more touch-friendly? I'm thinking in terms of production-oriented tablets/slates, so I guess I was thinking of iterations they were working on that touched on touch and the main OS rather than the dedicated OS they might make for a consumption-oriented tablet, which I don't really care about since I have no problems with Windows 7 + stylus/multitouch.

Edit: Ah I see: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Windows-8...me_id17228

I wonder if OSX's TTS will be any good for Japanese.