Hebrew TTS in iOS 8

[Geoff Shang]

Hi,

Just thought people here would be interested to know that the Karmit
Hebrew voice has shown up in iOS 8.0 beta 3 which was released today.

We have only played with it a little, having only just updated our
devices, but it seems to work quite well and in most instances we tried,
it was able to detect Hebrew text even when the main output was set to
English.

We are not sure that we got the enhanced quality to work propperly, it
sounded fairly default quality to me but maybe that's just the voice. I'd
expect some kinks with it being new and all that.

We have not yet tried installing and typing on a Hebrew keyboard, and
since the device we have iOS 8 on is not a phone, we've not tried reading
any of the Hebrew SMS spam we all get on our phones.

iOS 8 is still in beta. If you want to get access to the beta and check
it out before it's released to the public, you will need to join the Apple
developer program. This costs $99/year. You can read more about the
program at http://developer.apple.com. Please note that iOS 8 beta 3 is
likely still pretty buggy and may crash frequently and/or do other nasty
things.

iOS 8.0 is expected to be released to the public in September, to coincide
with the initial release of the iPhone 6. iOS 8 will run on the following
currently available devices: iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s,
iPad 3, iPad 4, iPad Air, iPad Mini, iPad Mini 2 and iPod Touch 5. It is
possible that this speech may not be available on some devices, though as
it is present on the iPad Mini 1, I'd expect it to be present on all other
supported devices.

I do not know if Karmit will be available in Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite, I
would hope that it is but I've not signed up for the Mac developer
program. I will try to find out.

Cheers,
Geoff.