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From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: MacinTalk
Message-ID: <1090@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Mon, 15-Sep-86 04:40:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1090
Posted: Mon Sep 15 04:40:56 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 15-Sep-86 18:33:55 EDT
References: <1151@hou2h.UUCP> <270@joevax.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Centram Systems, Berkeley
Lines: 26

As far as MacinTalk is concerned, is Apple at all serious about this
product?  Does anyone know?  There has been no upgrade since the initial
release, which as I recall was in Spring or Summer 1985.  I have seen only
two applications which use it, neither of them well, and neither of them
from Apple.  First, the Talking Moose desk accessory, which periodically
causes a poorly animated moose to appear on your screen, say something
unfunny [unless you program it yourself], and then vanish, leaving you
wishing you had turned it off; and second, Servant, which has a thoroughly
obnoxious talk mode that speaks the name of any file you select and so
forth, using no dictionary file so that most of the names are horribly
garbled, and slowing the most basic operations down by a factor of four or
more.  Great stuff, eh?

The MacinTalk voice also violates the most basic rule of Macintosh software:
it is not aesthetically pleasing.  In fact, it grates.  Badly.  Very, very
badly.  It is totally un-natural sounding, and often hours of fiddling does
not suffice to create a proper pattern of intonation for a sentence.

So has Apple dropped this turkey or what?
-- 
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot and Self-Assigner of Pretentious Titles
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)

"Little people, with tiny brains; little bullets flowing in their veins!
What do they want?  They want you!" - Oingo Boingo, "Tiny Guns"