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Support FAQ for Mac OS X users
How do I download and purchase voices?
You can download evaluation versions of our voices from the downloads page. These evaluation versions are fully functional, but will continually remind you that they aren't registered. To continue using our voices on a permanent basis (as well as remove the nag messages), you must purchase a valid license from the Cepstral Store.
How long are my license keys valid, and how do I upgrade?
Your keys will function indefinitely for the major version you purchased, including incremental updates (5.x.x). When a new major version is released (6.x.x) you will have to upgrade your license should you choose to use the new version. However, if you decide not to upgrade, your previous version will continue to work, so a repeat purchase will never be necessary.
For more information on upgrading, please see the Upgrade Page.
How can I retrieve my license information?
If you have purchased voices or other licenses from Cepstral and need to retrieve your license information, you can make use of our License Key Recovery System.
To make use of the Recovery System, you need to have access to the email address you provided when you purchased your voices. To retrieve your license information, visit the License Key Recovery System and enter the email address you provided when you purchased your voices and other licenses, then our system will validate it against our records and mail your license information to you.
If you do not have access to the email account you used when you purchased, please contact us and we can update our system to reflect your current email address. Please provide as much information as you can regarding your purchase(s). Any of the following will be useful: your name, the email address you used when you purchased, and your order number(s). Please also provide your current email address.
How do I install voices?
To install a Cepstral voice package under Apple Macintosh OS X, follow these steps:
1. Double click the .dmg (Disk Image) file that you downloaded. This will mount the disk image, placing a link to it on your desktop and opening the disk image for you to view its contents. The image contains a PDF document and a .mpkg (Meta Package) file.
2. Read through the PDF document if you desire.
3. Double-click the .mpkg file to launch it with the Installer application.
NOTE: If double-clicking this file has no effect, you may need to associate .mpkg files with Installer. In this case, follow these steps:
A. Ctrl+Click the .mpkg file and choose "Open With," then select "Installer." If "Installer" is not listed under "Open With," choose "Other..." and browse to
Applications -> Utilties -> Installer
Be sure to check the box for "Always open with."
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation process.
How do I uninstall voices?
You can uninstall voices by going to the "Cepstral Voices" button in System Preferences, selecting the voice you wish to remove, and clicking the "Uninstall..." button at the bottom of the window.
If for some reason the above method doesn't work, or you are having issues after upgrading your Cepstral voices, we have created a script which will clean all Cepstral voices and files from your machine, allowing you to start over from scratch. To run this script, simply do the following:
- Save this file to your desktop (Safari will automatically unzip the archive for you)
- Open the Terminal application (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)
- In the Terminal window, type "cd ~/Desktop" and hit Return
- In the Terminal window, type "sudo ./cepstral_macosx_uninstall.pl" and hit Return
- You will be prompted for your password (It is required because the "sudo" part tells the system to run as the super user; You need to prove to the Mac OS that you have rights to do this.)
At this point, all Cepstral voices and files should be removed. It is safe to begin installing Cepstral voices again.
Once I purchase voices, how do I enter my license keys?
Method #1: You can enter your license key by going to the "Cepstral Voices" button in System Preferences, selecting the voice you wish to register, and clicking the "License..." button at the bottom of the window. When you select this option, you will be presented with a dialog where you fill in your name, company (if you entered a company when you purchased), and your license key for that given voice. Everything must be entered exactly as it was given to you on your invoice page. (You should have also received this information via e-mail when you purchased).
Method #2: Alternatively, you can enter your license key using the command-line swift utility with the OS X Terminal program (located at Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal).
To register a voice using the swift command line tool, call swift with the '--reg-voice' switch. You will be prompted to enter your name, your company name, the name of the voice you wish to register, and then the license key.
swift --reg-voice
Your Name: John Q. Public
Company (if applicable): Acme Widgets
Voice: David
License Key: xx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx
You will receive feedback regarding the validity of your entries. If the information is valid, the voice will no longer nag.
Once I purchase a concurrency license, how do I enter my key?
To enter your concurrency license, you must use the swift command line tool (with the '--reg-ports' switch) with the OS X Terminal program (located at Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal). This command must be performed as a privileged user (sudo). You will be prompted to enter your name, your company name, the number of ports you wish to register, and then the license key.
sudo swift --reg-ports
Your Name: John Q. Public
Company (if applicable): Acme Widgets
Number of ports
(blank = unlimited): 8
License Key: xx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx
You will receive feedback regarding the validity of your entries. If the information is valid, your concurrency license will be active immediately.
How can I tell if my Concurrency License is being used by the system?
This information is presented when you run the 'swift -V' command with the OS X Terminal program (located at Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal). As an example, you may see:
swift -V
Cepstral Swift v4.1.0, June 2006
Default Voice: Callie v4.1.0
Language: US English v4.1.0
Lexicon: US English v4.1.0
Concurrency: 16 Port(s) Registered
7 Port(s) In Use
Additionally, if you are programming an application using the Swift API, you can retrieve this information through a function call. Please see the Cepstral SDK documentation for more information.
What are the minimum system requirements?
The minimum system requirements for running Cepstral voices are as follows:
- Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above (including Tiger 10.4.x)
- CPU: PowerPC G3, G4, G5, Intel Core Solo, Core Duo
- System Memory: 64MB
- Storage Space: 25-110 MB (per voice)
Do you run on Intel Macs, as well as PowerPC Macs?
Yes, our binaries are universal, so you can use our voices on newer Intel-based Macs, as well as existing PowerPC-based Macs.
How do I make use of Cepstral voices?
Cepstral voices work with Speech Manager, so any application which uses the Speech Manager can use Cepstral voices.
Cepstral voices will show up in the Speech Control Panel in System Preferences. From there you can listen to each voice, and select which voice to use as your system default voice.
What applications are compatible with your voices?
The following is a sample of known compatible applications (listed alphabetically). If an application is known to work but is not listed here, please let us know!
* If you are using one of these applications and your Cepstral voices aren't working with it, please contact the respective manufacturer for information on how to integrate Cepstral voices with their software.
How can I alter my text to control how the Cepstral voice reads it?
You can use SSML - the Speech Synthesis Markup Language. For more information about using SSML with Cepstral voices, please see this page.
What do I do if a word isn't pronounced correctly?
Word pronunciations are specified in the lexicon. Pronunciations for words not known to the lexicon are generated using a statistical model.
Many words have more than one possible pronunciation. These words are known as homonyms or homographs. The Swift engine tries to disambiguate, or guess which of the possible pronunciations is correct. For example, the word "read" can be either a present- or past-tense verb.
"I like to read books" -> should be pronounced "reed"
"I read that book last week" -> should be pronounced "red"
Pronunciation of the word "graduate," on the other hand, depends on whether it is a verb or a noun.
"Congratulations to the graduates of 2004" -> should be pronounced "gra-dyu-its"
"He will go to medical school after he graduates" -> should be pronounced "gra-dyu-eyts"
Swift keeps many homographs in the lexicon. Depending on your application, you may wish to force one pronunciation to be chosen. This can be done by editing the lexicon.txt file. You can also customize pronunciations by adding them to lexicon.txt.
Another way to change how a word is pronounced is to embed pronunciations as you would wish them spoken into the text, using either Apple embedded speech commands or SSML.
* Note, that once an entry is added to the lexicon file, all occurrences of that word will be pronounced using the specified phonemes.
How can I enter embeded pronunciations of words in-line with text?
There are several ways to affect pronunciation, and which one to use depends on how you are using the application.
If you are using almost any application that uses the Apple Speech Manager, with our voices appearing along side all of the Apple or other voices, then you would probably want to use the Apple embedded commands for controlling the TTS. Should this be the case, you can find a good reference here, and particularly for phonetic input using Apple's phoneme set, with examples here.
If you are using it this way, you need to use the Speech Manager embedded commands and not another mark-up language (such as SSML).
Example, from their documentation:
Hello, I am [[inpt PHON]]mAYkAXl[[inpt TEXT]], the talking computer.
The alternative is when you are using the swift command line application to process text. In this case, you are using our native interface, and we support the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) with our own phoneme set (and not the Applebet).
With this you can put in-line pronunciations and other mark-up defined in the SSML standard.
Our phonetic alphabet is the one that you also use when making entries into a swift voice dictionary (lexicon.txt). You can find more about this here.
Example:
Welcome to <phoneme ph="k eh1 p s t r ah0 l">Cepstral</phoneme>.
Of course, this example is contrived, because our engine already says "Cepstral" properly.
How can I embed Cepstral TTS into my [PHP/CGI/etc] web application?
The best way to use Cepstral voices in your web application is to make a system call to the swift command-line utility to generate an audio file on disk that you can then send or stream back to the client's web browser.
The swift utility is installed with every voice for Mac OS X, Desktop Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The swift executable can be found at:
/usr/bin/swift
For a complete list of usage options, run swift --help on the command line. Before adding calls to swift to your web application, we suggest that you spend some time using swift interactively on the command line to learn about its usage and features. Some common examples follow:
To specify a voice by name:
swift -n Callie "This is a test."
To create a .wav file:
swift -o myaudiofile.wav "This is a text."
To convert text from an input file to speech in a .wav file:
swift -f mytextfile.txt -o my audiofile.wav
To see a listing of synthesis events corresponding to the audio:
swift --events "This is a test."
A complete list of options and more examples are available by running swift --help.
* Any public distribution of Cepstral generated audio requires an additional permit. To learn about, or purchase an Audio Distribution License, please visit the licensing page on the Cepstral Store.
How do I edit the lexicon?
A file can be created in any voice's installation directory called lexicon.txt which can be modified for custom pronunciation of certain words. For more details about editing this file, see this page.
* Note, that once an entry is added to the lexicon file, all occurrences of that word will be pronounced using the specified phonemes.
How do I create a WAV file of the spoken text?
All platforms include a command line program called "swift", which can perform several functions, such as saving the spoken output to a wav file.
Open the OS X Terminal program (located at Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal). Please note which directory you're in, as that is where the wav file will be saved (unless otherwise specified) and where Swift will look for text files to read (again, unless otherwise specified).
To hear Swift speak aloud, type:
swift "hello world"
To speak aloud with a specific Cepstral voice installed on your system (Emily for example), type:
swift -n Emily "hello world"
To save the spoken output to a wav file, type:
swift -n Emily "hello world" -o myfile.wav
To convert a plain text file into a spoken wav file, type:
swift -n Emily -f textfile.txt -o myfile.wav
That's all there is to it. To see a list of all available options you can use with Swift, type swift by itself, and press Enter.
How do I choose a different audio format?
The default output format we use is 16-bit signed linear PCM, little-endian, at the native sampling rate of the voice, and contained within a WAV file.
There are three engine parameters that control the format of outputed audio in Swift. The audio/output-format parameter specifies the container type to use for the audio. It can be raw (no container, just the data), riff (a WAVE file), or snd (used by Sun). In contrast, audio/encoding specifies the format of the data that goes inside the container: 8-bit PCM, 16-bit PCM, u-law or a-law. The default sampling rate is the sampling rate of the voice for 16-bit PCM, or 8kHz for the other encodings. It can be overidden with the audio/sampling-rate parameter.
For example, the following command will create an unheader 8kHz u-law file:
swift Hello -o myfile.raw -p audio/encoding=ulaw,audio/output-format=raw
Or 8-bit, 8kHz linear PCM:
swift Hello -o myfile.wav -p audio/encoding=pcm8,audio/sampling-rate=8000
Note that our 8-bit PCM output is currently unsigned.
* We do not support saving to compressed formats at this time (such as mp3 or ogg vorbis) so you'll still need a 3rd party application to convert the WAV for you.
How do I use the real-time special effects?
The easiest way to set effects globally (so you can hear them within other applications) is to save the individual parameters in a text file called 'default.sfx' and save that in the voice's data directory (see below). Then the voice will automatically use that SFX file when it speaks.
The voice data directory (with David, for example) is typically at:
/Library/Speech/Voices/David.SpeechVoice/Contents/Resources/default.sfx
If you're an audiophile and feel comfortable in a virtual rack environment, feel free to use our SpeechFX Rack to create SFX files which Swift can use.
Several sample SFX files are supposed to be included with the voice packages. However, the current release of Cepstral Voices for Mac OS X does not include them. You can download them from here.
How do I make a voice louder?
Using the technique described in the SFX section, create a file called 'default.sfx' and save that file in the voice's data directory. Then add the following line to the 'default.sfx' file:
GAIN 2
The range can be from 0 to infinity, with 1 being the default. The value is a multiplier. "GAIN 2" is twice as loud as default, and "GAIN .5" is half as loud as default. You may have to play with the levels to get it just right, since some voices may pop if the signal becomes too strong.
Why have my Cepstral voices gone silent?
If your Cepstral voices have stopping producing any audible output, it may be that your system's audio properties have been adjusted (either manually or by another application) to settings that are incompatible with Cepstral voices. To correct this, follow these steps:
- Launch the "Audio MIDI Setup" application found in Applications -> Utilities.
- Under the "Audio Devices" tab, choose "Built-in Output" next to "Properties For:"
- Choose 44100.0 Hz as the "Format" for audio output.
If adjusting these settings does not resolve the issue for you, please let us know.
I have a question that isn't covered here.
For all other technical support inquiries, please use our Contact Request Form. Please provide as much technical information as possible. Thank you!
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