Is it possible to get better voices?
iSpeak It uses the voices installed on your Mac. While Apple provides a set of acceptable voices, it can be difficult to listen to long documents using these voices.

You can purchase alternative voices from Cepstral. These voices are of a much higher quality — they even provide French, German, and Spanish voices (in addition to a variety of English voices).

How do I setup iSpeak It to automate as many activities as possible?
For starters you can go into the iTunes panel and set the artist, album and genre you want to apply to all of your songs (clicking Apply — or OK, but that will initiate a transfer — will save the settings). Don’t worry about the song name, it will automatically be applied based on the document name (file name, URL, etc) when you initiate a transfer. Now you can automatically initiate a transfer (by either command-clicking the iTunes button or by selecting Automatic iTunes Transfer from the Preferences to auto initiate a transfer after every files/web page load) and not worry about these settings.

You can also automate the applying of Replacement Rules by selecting Automatic in the Replacement Rules window. With this set iSpeak It will apply the rules prior to transferring the current document to iTunes.

Within the News and Weather panels you can select the information you want to download and click on the Apply button (or OK, but that will initiate a download) to save your settings. After that you can command-click to automatically download based on your settings. And if you’ve registered iSpeak It you can choose to automatically download the News and Weather every time you launch iSpeak It.

Finally, you can automate the downloading of web pages. iSpeak It will always remember the last URL you downloaded (or you can simply enter the URL and click the Apply button). You can then command-click the Web Page button to automatically download the last URL. And if you’ve registered iSpeak It you can save multiple web page URLs and choose to automatically download all of the pages every time you launch iSpeak It.

How do I get Xgrid working? How can I figure out what’s going on?
The first thing you should do is read the iSpeak It Help — we’ve provided full instructions on setting things up to ensure that iSpeak It can use networked Macs to process documents.

Apple provides a set of Server Tools that you should download and install. The tools include Xgrid Admin, which gives you a detailed look at the jobs running on a grid (including a rating of your grid’s overall performance in MHz) and the status of the Agents (Macs) available to your grid.

I have hundreds of documents to convert. Is there an easy way to do this?
iSpeak It can load multiple documents at the same time by selecting them from the Load File dialog or by dragging and dropping them onto an iSpeak It window. After they’re loaded you can transfer them all to iTunes by holding down the control key while selecting Transfer to iTunes in the File menu.

How do I get text from any application into iSpeak It?
iSpeak It includes support for the most popular document formats. It’s impossible to provide support for everything so it also includes a Services menu item. Select the text in your document and choose the iSpeak It menu item in the Service menu and the text will be loaded into iSpeak It.

Note that after installing iSpeak It you will have to log out and back in for the menu item to appear in your Services menu. OS X also requires that the application be present within the Applications folder.

If you select text and the iSpeak It menu item is disabled, this means that the application does not include support for Services and the text cannot be loaded by iSpeak It (or any other service).

How do I preview the speech of a portion of a document?
This is supported by two menu items under the File menu. You can start and stop the speaking of any part of your document by selecting these items. If you select a portion of the document only that portion will be spoken. If nothing is selected the entire document will be spoken.

How do I stop that transfer of a document into iTunes?
When you see the conversion progress indicator in the top right corner of the iSpeak It document window you can press command-. or the escape key to terminate the conversion.

Where can I find Web pages that are easy to convert to speech?
Most Web pages have items such as button/link bars and ads that hinder the conversion from text to speech. One common technique is to use the printable version of a page since it removes all of these “nuisances”. You can also create a replacement rule that take the button bar text and replaces it with nothing.

For pages that you want to listen to on a regular basis (such as news sites) you can make use of the PDA friendly version of these sites. These versions have been optimized for viewing on a Palm so they tend to be straight text. For example, MacNN has a mobile version of its news that converts very nicely. It can be found at www.macnn.com/mobile/.

There are also listings of PDA friendly sites. In general, if you can figure out the URL used for AvantGo support you can download the text via iSpeak It. If you know of any better listings, please let me know.

What about RSS feeds?
Since RSS feeds are mainly text they’re great for text-to-speech conversion. If you’re trying to find RSS feeds there are plenty available; you can search for them at syndic8.

How do I change the Speech settings?
iSpeak It uses the Speech settings defined via System Preferences. You can open the preferences directly from iSpeak It by going to the application menu and selecting Speech Preferences.

Why does it take so long to convert a document?
In order for iSpeak It to convert a document it has to use your Mac’s text-to-speech engine. This can only be done in real time so it will end up taking as long as it does to listen to the document when it’s finished. If you have a long document, I’d consider letting your Mac work on it overnight.

With version 3.0 of iSpeak It you can now use Xgrid to speed up the processing of a document. As long as you have access to more than one Mac (or processor) you can use Xgrid to take advantage of them.

Why can’t I load Word and/or AppleWorks files?
If the load pane does not allow you to select a Word or AppleWorks file it’s because the application required to load the file wasn’t found. iSpeak It uses Word to load Word documents and AppleWorks to load AppleWorks documents. Note that when running under Panther (OS X 10.3.x), iSpeak It will use TextEdit to load Word documents.

What’s the difference between load and open?
iSpeak It works with text documents natively. When you create/edit a file it’s saved as a text file. As such it can only open text files. Load is used to identify documents that are not handled natively, rather they’re converted to text for manipulation by iSpeak It. The term load is used to make it clear that there’s more going on than simply opening the file.

Can I open PDF files that are locked?
Not at this time. I’m considering adding support for ID and password prompting if there are enough people that want it.

Why does nothing (sensible) get loaded with some PDF files?
This problem is most likely due to the contents of the PDF. iSpeak It sometimes has problems if there are a lot of images. These files cannot be loaded at this time.

Why doesn’t iSpeak It say certain phrases properly?
Speech problems are due to weaknesses in Apple’s text-to-speech engine. Being able to convert text to speech is very hard so you have to allow for some errors. If you have text that’s causing a problem your best bet is to replace it with text that is “spelled out” for the system. iSpeak It includes replacement rules to automate this. If you consistently have a problem with a phrase then determine a good replacement and add it as a rule. After that, you can apply it to all the documents you need to convert.

It’s a good idea to experiment with a phrase prior to committing it to a replacement rule. To do this simply have the phrase in question spoken and modify it until you get what you want. After that, you know what you need for the replacement rule.

Why doesn’t the News and/or Weather download?
There are a number of potential causes for this. The error messages try to give you hints in terms of a lack of Internet connectivity or the inability to find a city (for weather). In addition, I’m simply pulling the information out of the web page based on its HTML formatted (called “screen scraping”). By its very nature this is a brittle approach since any change to the page’s format could break the application. If you have consistent problems let me know and I’ll see if this is the case so that I can get a fix out quickly.

I’m using the Japanese version of OS X and iSpeak It doesn’t seem to work.
I’ve looked into this problem and I can’t identify anything that I’m doing wrong. My guess is that this is a problem with an Apple framework not having full support for languages with multi-byte characters. I’d like to fix this problem and am always on the look out for anything to try. It may be that 10.3 fixes this problem.