I don't want to get into the debate about what APH should have done but am curious if any of you agree with a rather strange proposition. It is that blind people
who use text-to-speech extensively aren't looking for human sounding voices anymore than we are looking for wings when we want to fly. Of course text-to-speech technology springs from human speech in that is what it is trying to imitate, but what human can talk as fast as Double Talk or Eloquence? What bird can fly at 35,000 feet where it is 40 below zero and have a cabin full of passengers drinking coffee. Fast and responsive are the keys for me in text and that's where the BPof old shines. I don't want to say the end all for TTS is what we have now, but I do wonder if there are several unique listening needs we as blind folks are seeking. One is "entertain me - I want to relax," and the other is "Feed me information - I have a lot of reading to do and not much time to do it." If there really are two needs, what should we do to see that we still have very fast and response speech, albeit not very human sounding?
