Voice Font - Common Uses

Common Uses

Like its text counterpart, each voice font can supply a different experience and provide a selection for different purposes. The simplest one is to select a voice font from a group in order to get the clearest one, or to choose the one with a speed that is appropriate for different settings.

For people who are hard of hearing in the upper range of the hearing spectrum, for example, selecting a voice that uses a lower pitch will deliver deeper sounds.

Another use for voice fonts is in electronic music. A commonly available set of synthetic voices from Macintosh computers can be used to enhance the mood of certain music pieces that need a voice but where the author feels that providing a human voice is not in their interests. Here, male voices can be combined in a choir to provide the tenor and bass for a particular piece, and female voices can be added to fill in other parts of the melody—resulting in a choir that consists of speech synthesis rather than different singers, or presenting a female voice when none are available to the arranger of the music.

Certain Macintosh clients of instant messaging services such as AOL Instant Messenger have had the option of reading incoming messages using the system's voice fonts. When message receiver has stepped away from the computer, or temporarily put away the part of the screen showing the incoming text, the computer reads the message outloud. This allows the user to continue with their other tasks without needing to view the incoming text.