Re: Different behavior between RealSpeak voices
- From: Alex Midence <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 09:11:01 -0500
Haven't heard of that one. Ever heard of Bex for apple II E with an
Echo 2? Murder. Absolute murder, it was. Us kids thought it was
the coolest thing since sliced bread though. That was like 1987 or
1988 or something.
Alex M
On 8/13/10, Lisle, Ted (CHFS DMS) <Ted.Lisle@xxxxxx> wrote:
> I go back to VoTalker. Anybody recall the little BASICA demo program,
> wherein VoTalker's singing "A Bicycle Built for Two" was supposed to
> really be the cat's pajamas? The engine had a neat little lexicon
> program that allowed you to fine tune its pronunciation, but it never
> loaded with the screenreader, so it did most of us no good at all. I
> think it was intended for custom applications. Thus I became accustomed
> to hearing myself referred to as "Teddy Davvid Lissle."
>
> Ted
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Alex Midence
> Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 10:29 AM
> To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Different behavior between RealSpeak voices
>
> also, there's a new dectalk out. It's version 6. I have no idea
> whatsoever if it has impacted the versions of the tts that are
> available for use with screen readers but, who knows, they might've
> fixed all the pronunciation bugs. Astoundingly good is an apt
> description. It's pronunciation is clear, the responsiveness of the
> speech engine is good, and, it can be sped up with no degradation of
> the quality of the speech. Klatt deserves a Nobel Prize for his work,
> IMHO. You can not get the same performance out of any concatonated
> tts engine like the natural sounding voices. Here's why.
>
> Warning: Technical stuff follows. Did my best to use plain English.
> First, in case anyone is wondering, concatonated means strung
> together. You do this in programming all the time. You can tell the
> computer to have Q represent "Hello" and then fix it so that N stands
> for name and leave it blank so someone can fill it in. You can then
> tell the computer to ask for someone's name and tel it to display Q
> plus n on the screen. The result is "Hello Fred" or "Hello Mary" or
> whatever you put in. You had it concatonate hello and fred to make
> that sentence. Same principal is applied with natural voices both the
> ones free with Jaws and the others you buy like Cepstral and NeoSpeech
> and all of them. It basically means that they have a bunch of
> clusters of sounds and sylables called phonemes that they string
> together like beads on a necklace to make the synthesizer make a word
> or sentence. They sometimes even go so far as to use a real human
> voice, digitize the individual phonemes produced when that person
> speaks and hope that when those phonemes (which are stored in some
> sort of data base of sound files are strung together during the
> reading of text by the machine, that they will be as close to the real
> person's speech as possible. The natural voices have large chunks of
> these phonemes with included pauses that make up a unit that is then
> used for that sort of stringing together. Traditional speech
> synthesizers use a more digital approach. They don't concern
> themselves with natural human patterns of speech or breathing or any
> of that. It's all numbers and units of time. Make that vowel x
> milliseconds long, make that s or t or f have such and such a
> frequency, pause for x number of milliseconds after commas, or periods
> or semicolons; that sort of thing. When you speed the speech up, it
> just scales those intervals to the speed of the speech you have it set
> to. The concatonated tts's are still too busy trying to mimic natural
> rhythms of speech and preserve the fidelity of the human quality of
> the voice so, you get this little shiver or quaver at the beginning of
> some sylables because, frankly, people just don't talk that fast. You
> get the reduced responsiveness because complex sound files like that
> take up lots of memory more so than the digital artificial rendering
> of sound you get from the more robotic voices. Those have been around
> for so long that they were originally used in pc's like 8086's (I
> learned Dos on such a machine using Vert, anyone remember Vert? Oh,
> the pain! Oh, the suffering!). Those pc's had tiny ram memories like
> 640k (not even a meg, folks) and they worked just fine with those
> synthesizers. You could even run DecTalk on those machines (Vocal
> Eyes, anyone?), and still have good responsiveness.
>
> Sorry about the length. I'm a linguist/programmer/technoNerd and this
> really got me going. Any corrections to what I have stated above are
> welcome. a lot of this is the product of curiosity-driven reading and
> a bit of educated hypothesis.
>
> Alex M
>
>
>
>
> On 8/12/10, Adrian Spratt <Adrian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Ha. You're right about that example, which is easily fixed through the
> JAWS
>> dictionary. But for the most part, Dectalk Express pronunciation is
>> astoundingly good.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf
>> Of Kerri
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2010 11:31 AM
>> To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: Re: Different behavior between RealSpeak voices
>>
>> Dectalk is superior to most synthesizers out there but it does have a
> lot of
>> pronunciation difficulties. It says "strung" instead of "stung"
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Alex Midence" <alex.midence@xxxxxxxxx>
>> To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2010 7:13 AM
>> Subject: Re: Different behavior between RealSpeak voices
>>
>>
>>> I'm partial to Huge Harry, myself. I have him at 425 words per
> minute
>>> on my Reading Edge with inflection set to highest and it sounds just
>>> fine to me. Wife thinks it sounds like an auctioneer on speed.
>>> Sounds just fine to me though. I never understood why people are
> down
>>> on artificial voices. If you're using a computer, why do you expect
>>> it to sound human? Persoanlly, it creeps me out a bit.
>>>
>>> Alex M
>>>
>>> On 8/11/10, Lisle, Ted (CHFS DMS) <Ted.Lisle@xxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> I find I have to listen much harder, and somewhat slower, to an
>>>> external voice. I can handle Glenn at a tremendous pace, and never
> miss a
>> word.
>>>> As fast as current hardware busses are, it simply may not be
> possible
>>>> to get the kind of tight integration and smooth phrasing from an
>>>> external voice that we can from one incorporated into the
> screenreader.
>>>>
>>>> Ted
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
>>>> Behalf Of Yadiel
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 9:37 PM
>>>> To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>>> Subject: Re: Different behavior between RealSpeak voices
>>>>
>>>> Yes! Although I prefer jill. "She" sounds... well... in lack of a
>>>> better
>>>>
>>>> phrase, more sweet and plecent to the ear. Although, not as
> responsive.
>>>> In
>>>> fact, I yet haven't found a voice that is as responsive as I would
> like.
>>>>
>>>> Real Speak Solo direct or sappy 5, I still can't find a good
> sounding
>>>> responsive voice. That is why I use eloquence for most of my task
>>>> including web surfing and use the real speak and sappy 5s for
> reading
>>>> very long documents.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yadiel
>>>>
>>>> --------------------------------------------------
>>>> From: "Dale E. Heltzer" <deheltzer@xxxxxxx>
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 8:47 PM
>>>> To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>>> Subject: Different behavior between RealSpeak voices
>>>>
>>>>> Some days ago I posted about how RealSpeak Daniel doesn't always
>>>>> pronounce words the way they're written.
>>>>> I've been using Samantha, and have noticed no such shortcomings -
>>>>> and "she" is much more responsive than Daniel.
>>>>>
>>>>> Anyone else notice this?
>>>>> ---
>>>>> Dale E. Heltzer
>>>>> deheltzer@xxxxxxx
>>>>>
>>>>>
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