Following up on my previous post… I discovered something that struck me as odd about the voices in Lion.

Each voice is given a person's name, and comes with a short sentence or two with which the "person" introduces him- or herself when you hit "Play" in System Preferences. This "demo text" is stored in the Info.plist file associated with each voice.

For example, here's Fiona introducing herself:

$ plutil -convert xml1 /System/Library/Speech/Voices/Fiona.SpeechVoice/Contents/Info.plist -o - | grep -A 1 VoiceDemoText

<key>VoiceDemoText</key>
<string>Hello, my name is Fiona. I am a Scottish-English voice.</string>

Often, as in this example, the demo text contains the name of the voice.

The odd thing is that the voice name always seems to be in English, even if the native language doesn't use the English alphabet. For example, the Thai voice Narisa:

$ plutil -convert xml1 /System/Library/Speech/Voices/NarisaCompact.SpeechVoice/Contents/Info.plist -o - | grep -A 1 VoiceDemoText

<key>VoiceDemoText</key>
<string>สวัสดีค่ะ ดิฉันชื่อNarisa</string>

This particular snippet sounds okay, at least to my ear. I don't speak Thai, but I'm guessing "Narisa" is being properly pronounced.

Similarly, the Japanese "Kyoko" and Russian "Milena" sound okay to me:

こんにちは、私の名前はKyokoです。日本語の音声をお届けします。

Здравствуйте, меня зовут Milena. Я – русский голос системы.

(I'd appreciate input/corrections from native speakers of these languages.)

In any case, the Cantonese "Sin-Ji" voice definitely sounds off:

您好，我叫 Sin-Ji。我講廣東話。

And the Taiwanese "Ya-Ling" seems to be asking why she's ailing:

您好，我叫 Ya-Ling。我說國語。

I don't understand why Apple didn't use Chinese characters in the demo text for the names of the Chinese voices. I've filed bug #9949961 accordingly.

UPDATE: Minor fixes were introduced. I don't know when.