Inside Macintosh: Sound /

Chapter 4 - Speech Manager / About the Speech Manager

Callback Routines

The Speech Manager allows you to implement callback routines. With callback routines, you can synchronize speech with other actions. You can use callback routines to obtain information about when a synthesizer has finished speaking a phoneme, reaches a word ending, or finishes speaking. Using this feature, you could highlight text as it is being spoken or synchronize the speech production with a QuickTime movie or animation of a mouth speaking.

You can also customize speech that your application generates with the Speech Manager by embedding commands in text strings stored in resources in your application or by programmatically embedding commands in commonly spoken text.

The next section of this chapter shows you how to implement the most commonly used features of the Speech Manager. It demonstrates how you use the SpeakString function to convert a text string into speech without allocating a speech channel, how you can customize speech, how you can obtain more control over speech by allocating speech channels, and how you can make speech easier to understand by embedding commands within text strings. It also shows how to install a custom dictionary to provide more accurate pronunciation of less common words such as names.