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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!pyramid!hplabs!oliveb!3comvax!mykes
From: mykes@3comvax.UUCP (Mike Schwartz)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: speech from amigaterm
Message-ID: <470@3comvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 14-Apr-86 13:37:06 EST
Article-I.D.: 3comvax.470
Posted: Mon Apr 14 13:37:06 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 16-Apr-86 05:07:59 EST
References: <1837@caip.RUTGERS.EDU>
Reply-To: mykes@3comvax.UUCP (Mike Schwartz)
Organization: 3Com Corp; Mountain View, CA
Lines: 36

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I posted the first of the
CLI replacements (MyCLI).  After posting it, I made some modifications to
it to make it say out lout whatever came in over the wire.  It was kinda
neat being able to hear my Amiga read net.micro.amiga to me out loud.
However, there are some major problems with using speech in this manner.

1)	Spoken voice is very slow.  Byt his I mean that even 1200 baud is
.	much faster than the voice can keep up with.   AmigaTerm has a
.	few problems, most importantly the fact that it has too small
.	a buffer and will overrun if it gets too many bytes too fast.
2)	When reading the news, you have to listen to the Amiga read all
.	the mail headers (how do you pronounce UUCP - the Amiga doesn't
.	say it the same...).
3)	The translator/narrator are very good, considering their size,
.	but they are not good enough.  For example, they will say each
.	digit in the number 100 (one-zero-zero) instead of (one hundered).

By the way, I have looked at trying to fix the buffer problem with Amigaterm,
but with no success.  I have tried increasing the read buffer size (in 
the rs232 parameters), but there is no buffer big enough.  I tried using
x-on/x-off handshaking (I use AmigaTerm to talk to the vax here) and setting
the IO Control character double word to appropriate values, but it doesn't
work.

As a matter of fact, at 9600 baud (connected to my IBM PC), using the CTTY
command of MS-DOS, you can actually control the PC from the amiga.  However,
if you type a long file, AmigaTerm gets a buffer overrun  after a while and
starts printing garbage on the screen.  300 baud is the only speed I have
found that seems to work (it failed at all the rest...).

It seems to me that in order to get speech to work well on the Amiga, you
should use a tool like speechtoy to determine what misspellings you need
to make to make the narrator say what you really want.  Then you chould
take the translated phonem string and embed it in your 'c' source and
call the narrator only.  This makes the speech always correct, and does
not require the unneeded overhead of the translator library.