I completely agree, I don't care how human or not my text to speach sounds, I want speed and clarity and the new bookport is a step backwards in this respect. They seem to care more about it's recording capabilities rather than clear speach. I know the double talk is a hardware chip at the moment, but surely a software version or an emulator will become available at some point. I hope the new voices will please many of their customers, and if that is what people have asked for, then they will have to do it, it's just not what I wanted and I will be buying a couple of old book ports instead.
Shell.----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Wunder" <gwunder@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Bookport" <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 8:38 PM Subject: [bookport] Re: new book port
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 peoplewho 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?
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