[bookcourier] Re: BETTER VOICES?
- From: "John Schucker" <gwynn@xxxxxxx>
- To: <bookcourier@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 21:06:22 -0500
I usually don't participate on here, because I'm quite happy with my BC
and never have any problems with it. But I thought I'd comment, and
probably stir up some controversy in the process, on the whole "better"
voices thing.
First of all, I don't see that any of the other voices are any "better"
than the doubletalk. I've had sighted people say they can understand
the doubletalk fairly well on a first listen, with it slowed down
naturally. IBM via voice always sounds stilted to me at higher speeds.
Eloquence is OK, I've gotten used to it now. The AT&T "natural" voices
are anything but. Let me give the summary first, and then the
supporting arguments. Really what you mean when you say "better voice"
is "the voice that I happen to be used to and I don't feel like
changing."
Now let me explain why the doubletalk is an excellent choice. First of
all, the hardware is a paramount concern here. Most of the other
synthesizers are software, and they'd either need to be ported, or they
run on processors that likely consume much more power. The doubletalk,
on the other hand, is on a small integrated chip. That's a big part of
the reason your BC will run on two AA batteries for a good long time if
you're reading files with it. The doubletalk chip is designed to have
low power usage.
Second, consider the idea of multiple software synthesizers. Now the
decision has to be made if you want to keep the doubletalk chip in or
take it out and replace it with another CPU. Then, what operating
system/software are you going to have to use to make sure you can
support these other synthesizers? Also, right now you get the BC, you
push a button, and it pretty much works. With a software synthesizer
install option, first you have to contend with the differing
installation procedures of multiple synthesizers.
Then, suppose a user has installed synthesizer foo. Guess what happens
if the batteries run down? Synthesizer foo likely needs to be
reinstalled. So you'd still get users complaining that they were on the
road for a week and it reverted back to the doubletalk by default, or
reverted to whatever default software synthesizer they didn't like. You
have this same problem with PDAs like the pacmate and such. Your
battery dies, anything stored internally goes away.
I'm not saying, necessarily, that people shouldn't have choices. I'm
saying that I think the bookcourier was designed to do a specific job,
which IMO it does excellently. Out of all the electronic equipment I've
owned or experimented with as a blind person, and being blind all of my
life it's been quite a lot, I think the BC is the most usable and most
problem free piece of equipment I've ever seen, and I include software
like screen readers in this group as well. I think part of that is
because the speech synthesizer is built right into the equipment. It's
not some add-on that needs to be detected or that can get misconfigured
or something, it's an integrated part of the hardware. Adding other
synthesizers in software is, IMO, an unnecessary addition of a great
many complications.
Obviously, I'm not Springer Design. Only they can decide if the
tradeoff of the added complexity works well. As a fairly technical user
who's done some programming though, these are some reasons I'd stay with
the setup that we currently have. First because it works, and works
well, and second because making changes to support multiple synthesizers
which would have to be software as far as I can tell would add a great
deal of complexity in both hardware and software.
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