10:13am May 18, 2013

Proloquo2go now has a bunch of new features.

I don’t know if the new version will be crashier or less crashy than the last version. But it’s got some really cool new features.

Particularly, certain voices have had the voice actors record a number of new words. Some of them include swearing. Such that when you type the words (or sounds, like #aargh3 or something, or certain words with exclamation points after) they either make certain sounds, or else say the word with feeling. The best voice actor I’ve heard so far is the Lisa voice, which is female adult Australian English. So I’m using that one, because it has all the swear words available. And yes it will now say things like Fuck off! And, Piss off! And, Arsehole! With actual feeling. Which I love. Some of the voice actors are better than others. Some of them will say angry things while simply sounding vaguely generally emotional.

You can get a list of all the voice effects by creating a button, then at the side of the first line, there’s a little speech bubble you click on. Then you can listen to samples of all of them, or add them in. There are also macros, so that you can get it to say things like the current date.

I’m really going to enjoy this. Time to reprogram my swear words page, for instance, to include a lot of the more emotional renderings of the words. I’m glad they finally recognized that AAC users swear. Although there’s a lot of variation between the voices on what is available. Some will only say damn while others will say fuck, arsehole, bloody hell, piss off, etc. And I love this acknowledgement that AAC users actually need to be able to cuss, when so many people are hell bent on making sure we can be nothing but polite and passive.