[bookport] Re: suggestion

  • From: "David Allen" <wd8ldy@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2006 12:58:01 +1300

Hi Walt and list:

You are remembering correctly. The programme was mentioned here. The name escapes me because I still think it is unnecessary fiddling with material best left alone. Synthesisers are not perfect, whether they be on a chip like DoubleTalk or software like RealSpeak. Any attempt to try to make them into something they aren't will fail in some way that wasn't foreseen. A good example of this is trying putting all the state postal abbreviations into the Jaws dictionary. Then see how things no longer make sense.

Cheers,
Dave
----- Original Message ----- From: "Walt Smith" <walt@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, December 02, 2006 9:37 AM
Subject: [bookport] Re: suggestion


This has come up before and the problem is both the programming required to accomplish it and the physical space to store it. It would have to be stored
on the Book Port, itself, not on the CF card (since you'd lose the
dictionary if you changed cards). Moreover, there's an even more basic
question: does the Doubletalk synthesizer support such a function? At one
time, someone made available (I think it was on this list, but I may be
misremembering) a dictionary-like program that you would run the file
through before sending it to the Book Port. The changes were actually made
in the text. The processor in the BP quite possibly isn't robust enough to
store and process individual words on the fly the way the JAWS dictionary
does.

With regard to your second question, while I'm sure that the Doubletalk
_does_ have functions that aren't available by way of the settings menus,
I'd want to be very careful about what I included there. For example, most
BP users aren't necessarily extreme tech heavies and it would be very easy
to get the synthesizer into a situation where it was virtually unusable. The
obvious way out, of course, is to perform a complete reset and get back to
the defaults, but once a non-techie hoses their synthesizer's settings, I
have serious reservations about whether, in their emotional distress, they'd even remember to do that. Also, I know for a fact that if you monkey around
with enough settings, you can quite literally get some combinations of
settings that may actually damage the synthesizer, itself, so I'm personally not in favor of including much more in the way of synthesizer customization
than what we already have.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Simon Jaeger" <SimonJaeger@xxxxxxx>
To: <bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 8:14 PM
Subject: [bookport] suggestion


Hi,
This is just a suggestion for future bookport updates. Isn't it possible to
put something like the jaws dictionary manager in the book port using the
braille keypad? [for those of you who don't use jaws, this is to redefine
pronounciations - example, inoperable, in-opperable]
I really like the doubletalk synth but it mispronounces a lot of words, and it'd be great if I could redefine these without having to do it manually in
the text file.

Also, possibly intonation and reverberation menu items for the voice, making
the synthesizer fully customizable.

Thanks,

Simon





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