Replacing VOCA with a Laptop?

tomschuring asks: "A friend of mine has Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and because of it, he is using a Voice Output Communication Aid (VOCA). When I heard the quality speech of the portable device I was less than impressed. My Mac is much better at it and at least has a few different voices (like one with an English accent) to choose from. Has anybody used a laptop for this purpose? What text to speech engine are you using and what are our impressions? Is there predictive text software available for this purpose? Is the startup time and battery time acceptable for this sort of application?"

mobiles..

[gl4ss]

http://www.scansoft.com/speechpak/talks/ [scansoft.com] is a text-to-speech software for the blind for use on symbian based (9210 and series60 phones such as 3650, n-gage, 6600 and so on) that does text-to-speech.

anyhow, if you got a friend with s60 phone just give it a spin(you can try it for free). predictive text input is thrown in of course..

i'd imagine a laptop to be quite a bitch to carry around. hell, i'd just skip speaking - would probably be easier... and do stuff like typical phone calls through sms, irc and email.. and just carry around some paper and pencils(provided that he could type fast).

Re:2. Build assistive technology 3. Profit!

[MBCook]

I know nothing about this field or the question (with the exception that ATT's Natural Voices sounds amazing), but I think I know the answer to this question.

Economies of Scale

Sure you could make these devices and sell 'em for $20 proffit each, but where would that get you? Only a few thousand of these things must get sold each year (at most). So you company that makes these things needs more than $10000 (assuming 500 sales at $20) proffit to stay afloat. Also, the research on interfaces and such for those who can't use a keyboard might make these things loss leaders. If they make any proffit, they would want to make LOTS to cover all the expenses (again, without the economies of scale, they can't be built too cheaply).

It's that rarity that I would think would make it more expensive. Is there greed involved? Maybe. Maybe they overcharge so when people put it on medicare or insurance and the insurance company doesn't pony up all the dough they still get enough to make a proffit (I've heard of this in prices for other medial instruments and treatments).

Those are my guesses anyway.