Caramba de dónde vienen los typos?!

I think I've already covered on the blog how I am the world's worst proofreader - substantiated yet again this week! Thanks for sticking with me through some really ridiculous mistakes. There is most certainly a correlation between how late I type the newsletter, and what kind of errors can show up! Another problem I have is that my true love at the moment is development of new technologies - different types of interactivity, new interfaces that make use of emerging online tools, etc. And this is often very tedious work, (I design a lot in Macromedia Flash MX 2004) - where you have to squint to find 1 period or comma that can ruin your entire code. So after working for hours on things like that, text looks relatively simple - and it's easy to forget that errors can be just as deadly in text format!

I guess I'm in search of the perfect language learning solution...and with all of these incredible tools available, I get tunnel vision while pursuing my dream of building the ultimate application. I think these virtual characters will add a fun new element to the e-learning modules - but it's not as simple as just plugging in a cute little character - even finding a high quality voice has proven to be a challenge. Most of the readily available voices are very mediocre and computer-y sounding - and some of the higher quality ones like Loquendo and Scansoft - are not offered as individual units, but rather part of an expensive package. Microsoft actually has a couple of very nice voices licensed from Scansoft in their new Speech Engine 2004 - but the thing won't work with XP Home - ¡double Caramba!

So for now I'm using Acapela's Ana from Spain, and I also have Cepestral's Miguel from Latin America - although his quality is just barely above what I consider the minimum I would use. If anybody has a line on a terrific Latin American TTS voice, drop me a line!