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scottish female voice for proloquo2go ipad app users � och aye!!

Posted by Gillian McNeill on the 28th October, 2014

Having asked for Scottish voices from the AAC app developers some time ago, we are delighted to learn that a female voice has finally become available in Proloquo2Go (P2G). It’s called Rhona and is an adult female voice from the text-to-speech company Acapela. 

My immediate reaction to the news, was to dash to my iPad to update to P2G 3.0.5 so I could listen to her accent (the voice is included in the new update, with no additional cost) and I was not disappointed!

The voice has a clear quality with natural sounding intonation and having tested it with an initial selection of Scottish words, we are pleased to see that it has an accurate pronunciation of “ch” (the throaty unvoiced sound at the end of “loch”). Other comments from a quick survey from 8 of my CALL colleagues include:

“flowing intonation – no pauses with intonation changes”

“recognisably Scottish, but with a soft sounding quality, rather than strongly Scottish”

“copes well with even the trickier of pronunciations”

We rated the voice as 8.5 out of 10 for overall impression, which is a high score from us given our tendency to take great care in our assessing and appraising, and we expect that half of the Scottish adult population of P2G users will be happy too! Here’s hoping a male version will not be too far away!

Another comment from the team was that although it may be suitable for some secondary school-aged girls, younger girls (nursery/primary school?)  would prefer to have a child version. (So female and male Scottish child voices are on our wish list too!)

P2G is a symbol-based communication app from AssistiveWare, with a grid-based format which can be used by a range of AAC users from basic communication to a full communication system. The new voice is easy to download, first update to P2G 3.0.5 from the app store, then within the app go to options – speech – voice, select Rhona from the list of downloadable voices.

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