
Apple's new voices are available along with all the older voices (click for larger view). These include numerous European languages, Eastern European, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, other Asian languages, world variations of English (Indian, Australian, U.K., U.S., and more), and Middle Eastern languages like Arabic and Turkish. The system ships with some default voices, including the long-standing novelty ones such as laughing, whispering, bells, and alien voices, but now includes the option to enable high-quality male and female voices that mimic accents from numerous areas of the world. Since early in the Classic Mac OS, Apple has supported text-to-speech technology, with very basic and robotic output that has improved over the years, but with Lion the technology takes a relatively major leap forward. One of the features of OS X Lion that was discussed early on in its development was the updated text-to-speech technology that not only brings much more natural-sounding voices, but also has options for dialect and accent support for various regions of the world.
