Apple

The first speech system added into an operating system was Apple Computer's MacInTalk in 1984. Since the 1980s Macintosh Computers offered text to speech converter capabilities via The MacinTalk software. In the early 1990s Apple extended its potential presenting system wide text-to-speech converter support. With the launch of faster PowerPC-based computers they included better quality voice sampling. Apple also offered speech recognition into its systems which supplied a fluid command set. More recently, Apple has added sample-based voices. Starting as a novelty, the speech system of Apple Macintosh has developed into a cutting edge fully-supported program, PlainTalk, for people with vision issues. VoiceOver was included in Mac OS X Tiger and more up-to-date Mac OS X Leopard. The voice provided with Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") is called "Alex" and locates the taking of realistic-sounding breaths between sentences, as well as enhanced clarity at high read rates. The operating system also contained a command-line based application that turns text to audible speech.

AmigaOS

The second operating system with developed speech synthesis support was AmigaOS, released in 1985. The voice synthesis was approved by Commodore International from a third-party software house and it included a complete system of voice emulation, with both male and female voices and "stress" marker, made possible by developed features of the Amiga hardware audio chipset. It was made from a narrator device and a translator library. Amiga Speak Handler included an integrated “text-to-speech converter” translator. AmigaOS dealt with speech synthesis as a virtual hardware device, so the user could even redirect console output to it. Some Amiga software, such as word processors, made wide use of the speech system.

Microsoft Windows

Modern Windows systems use SAPI4- and SAPI5-based speech systems that contain a speech recognition engine (SRE). SAPI 4.0 was offered on Microsoft-based operating systems as a third-party add-on for systems like Windows 95 and Windows 98. Windows 2000 integrated a speech synthesis program called Narrator, directly offered to users. All Windows-compatible programs could make use of speech synthesis advantages, offered via menus once installed on the system. Microsoft Speech Server is an integrated package for voice synthesis and recognition, for commercial use such as call centers.

Speech synthesis converter features for a computer refers to the capacity to play back text in a spoken voice. Text-to-Speech converter is the capacity of the operating system to play back printed text as spoken words.

An integrated (installed with the operating system) driver (called a text-to-speech converter engine): recognizes the text and employs a synthesized voice (chosen from multiple pre-generated voices) speaks the written text. Extra engines (typically using particular jargons or vocabularies) are also offered through third-party manufacturers

Android

Version 1.6 of Android integrated support for speech synthesis.

Internet

Nowadays, there are a number of applications, plug-ins and tools that can read messages directly from an e-mail client and web pages from a web browser. Some specific software can tell RSS-feeds. On one hand, online RSS-narrators simplify information delivery by letting users to listen to their preferred news sources and to turn them to podcasts. On the other hand, on-line RSS-readers are offered on almost any PC connected to the Internet. Users can download created audio files to portable devices, e.g. with an aid of podcast receiver, and listen to them while walking, sitting in a bus or commuting to work.

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