Speech service

The next thing to make people wow is a built-in speech service. If you are not familiar with services in Mac OS X's poit of view - it's some functionality provided by some application for other applications. Service menu is available from main menu for any Mac OS application and for Windows switcher it's a first place to look for things that usually appear when doing a right-click. The main difference is that such a design alows much more functionality to be built in, while still being a context menu.

So, when you use an application that shows list of files, you can use Services from Finder for a selected file. You can send selected file or selected text to mail recipient using Services provided by Mail application. If you installed Skype, you can send file or selected text from any application to someone form your contact list. It's like Automator tasks that get available from any scriptable Mac OS application, but you should not really script anything - it's just one action and you can do it right away using Services menu.

But let's return to the topic of the post - the Speech Service. As you can imagine, it allows you to sit back in your chair and listen to computer-generated voice that reads aloud the text you have selected in any other application (well, not every single ones - I guess that only "native" apps are supported, for example Firefox, built with its specific framework, is not capable to trigger this service). I tried it on Safari, listening to synopsis of 22-nd episode of Lost 3 :)

It is by far the best generic audio-generation I ever heard. Not without glitches, but definitely much more human than what I have heard some years ago. It knows about punctuation and intonation, which is just amazing. Unfortunately, text is always spoken using English pronounciation rules so forget about listening your favourite Russian blog, news from Le Monde, or gossips from your Portugues-writing frinds on Orkut...

But it stil something that shows power of Mac OS and the beauty of siplicity, with which complex things are integrated into the system!