This is an update regarding my post about the international speech-to-text options on the Mac — specifically, about the text fragments they use for the "speakers" to introduce themselves.

The text fragment used by the Cantonese Sin-Ji voice still contains the name "Sin-Ji" in Romanized form, but somehow when it's pronounced it sounds more like Cantonese than before.

Here's the text fragment that gets spoken:

$ plutil -convert xml1 /System/Library/Speech/Voices/Sin-Ji.SpeechVoice/Contents/Info.plist  -o - | grep -A 1 VoiceDemoText
 
<key>VoiceDemoText</key>
<string>您好，我叫 Sin-Ji。我講廣東話。</string>

Here's how it used to sound:

Here's how it now sounds:

I wonder how it does that — how the text-to-speech engine can possibly know the right tones to use for "Sin-Ji", or even that it's a Chinese name. Regardless, I wish they'd use the Chinese characters for the name because I'd like to know what they are.

The text fragment used by the Taiwanese Ya-Ling voice does what I want. It has replaced the Romanized "Ya-Ling" with Chinese characters.

Here's the new text fragment ("Ya-Ling" has been replaced with "雅玲"):

$ plutil -convert xml1 /System/Library/Speech/Voices/Ya-Ling.SpeechVoice/Contents/Info.plist  -o - | grep -A 1 VoiceDemoText
 
<key>VoiceDemoText</key>
<string>您好，我叫 雅玲。我說國語。</string>

Here's how it used to sound — pretty disastrous:

Here's how it now sounds — note how different the "Ya-Ling" is:

You can hear these voices yourself by going to System Preferences > Dictation & Speech > Text to Speech. If you don't already have the voices for these languages installed, it'll take a while to download them.

I'm on 10.8.2. I don't know when Apple made these changes.