[bksvol-discuss] Re: Interesting K1000 Problem

  • From: "Evan Reese" <mentat1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 16:50:57 -0700

Thanks, Jake, I may try the ViaVoice and see how it works.  After playing with 
the default voice, though, I'm not sure if it is the voice hogging resources, 
or it is that it is not bringing the text into memory as soon as it is 
recognized.  I have noticed that when arrowing down through something I've 
scanned, I hear a lot of disk activity, as though it is getting the text from 
disk and not from memory.  It responds faster when arrowing up than down.  
Also, if I leave it for a minute or so - I didn't time it, but if I, say, go 
and read a couple of email messages - and come back to it, it responds as 
quickly as any other voice when I arrow down through the document I left open.

Still, I will see what happens with the other voices.  I do like the sound of 
Kate and Paul, though.  I could listen to them read for a long time.  They 
really sound pretty natural.  Once the engineers get the inflection down a 
little better, these voices will really sound virtually indistinguishable from 
a human voice, I would bet.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jake Brownell 
  To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
  Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 4:40 PM
  Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Interesting K1000 Problem


  Hi Evan,

  I find even with a gig of memory that the natural sounding voices can 
sometimes be quite sluggish.

  I would encourage you to try again the IBM TTS as I believe the Kurzweil 
version is newer. They also sound better. In addition Kurzweil has, if memory 
serves me correctly, blocked all the character combinations of length 4 from 
being passed to IBM if it will crash the engine.

  Keep in mind when Kurzweil does crash from either IBM problems or an internal 
error, you at most have lost a single page of work. The program will ask you if 
you want to open the last file that wasn't properly saved when you re-enter the 
product.

  Let us know what your experience is.

  Jake
    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Evan Reese 
    To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
    Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 6:20 PM
    Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Interesting K1000 Problem


    Thanks, Tiffany, I thought I might have imagined it there, because it is 
fully in English now, after I reloaded the program.  However, I am not sure I 
like this default voice they have.  It is very human-sounding, but I have a 
3-ghz Pentium with 512 megabytes, but still when I arrow down a page, just 
skimming something I put on the scanner, it seems to respond slowly.  I may 
have to try one of the others and see if it is a little more spritely.  I want 
to stay away from the ViaVoice engine, however, as that used to crash a lot on 
my OpenBook.

      ----- Original Message ----- 
      From: Tiffany H. Jessen 
      To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
      Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 4:13 PM
      Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Interesting K1000 Problem


      On my computers I still only have version eight and nine, and my friend 
has version ten, and the two of us both come across this. Not only when 
changing settings, but even right in the middle of reading a page.. of English 
none-the-less! My computers seem to prefer French and German, while my friend's 
changes to something Asian. Neither of us can figure why this happens, because 
what's worse, is that we haven't installed any additional languages, so why, or 
even how, it changes we don't know. This happens with both the reading and 
message voice. Sometimes it's only one or the other, while other times it's 
both at once. Usually I cannot undo it, so what I do is save the file based on 
my already having memorized the keystrokes, and then I close and reopen the 
program. At that point everything goes back to my default settings.
      Tiff

        ----- Original Message ----- 
        From: Evan Reese 
        To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
        Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 6:45 PM
        Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Interesting K1000 Problem


        I just installed the K1000 demo, and I was just looking through the 
menus to see what was in them.  I notice that in the scanning settings, when 
changing the delay between repeated scans, and in changing the scanning 
brightness, the voice changes and speaks in a foreign language I cannot 
identify.  Anyone heard of this?  I guess I gotta read the manual at some 
point, but this seems a little weird.  If it is speaking English all the rest 
of the time, why would it change languages for just those two settings, at 
least those are the only ones I have seen so far.  I haven't looked at all of 
them, yet.  Still, very strange.



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