Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!rutgers!seismo!munnari!goanna!ajk From: ajk@goanna.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: narrator device (and some trivia) Message-ID: <663@goanna.oz> Date: Mon, 9-Feb-87 00:54:46 EST Article-I.D.: goanna.663 Posted: Mon Feb 9 00:54:46 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 10-Feb-87 04:00:55 EST Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia Lines: 73 Keywords: thai, problems with narrator I had noticed some articles on the narrator device, so I thought I would add a few of my wishes/experiences/problems. I have been trying to get the narrator to talk Thai. I have written a program which allows words and sentences to be entered in Thai and English and quiz me on them. The Amiga was good in a number of ways (having intution for building the interface, having fonts so I could build up a Thai font - which is not as easy as english!). For the fun of it I tried to get it to speak Thai but came up with the following problems. (1) Thai has (approx) 33 vowel sounds and 44 consonants (this includes a lot of duplicates however). The narrator simply cannot do them all, although some could be made from stringing others together. I have to be careful of examples given in books too as they all have American accents! (I am in Australia) (2) Thai is a tonal language - each syllable has a different meaning if it is pronounced with a rising, falling, low, middle or high tone. The length of the sound is also important. Each word can also have a number of syllables. To get complete control of tone and duration I have been sending one syllable at a time to the narrator. The narrator unfortunately puts a pause at the end of each syllable (or at the beginning - I am not sure) but makes very disjoint speach. A 'build your own phoneme' device would be extremely useful to get the phonemes right, but better tonal and duration control would also be useful. The way I tricked the narrator into doing the tones for me was for the constant tones (low, middle, high) to use the robotic voice, and for the rising and falling to use the natural voice and placing a '?' or '.' at the end of the syllable (which also may be causing the pause). I have not tried to use the stress marks for tonal control yet. Has anyone done so? I didnt think I would be able to get two rising tones right next to each other from it (rising tones always start from the same tone). Any help, suggestions, comments anyone? I really would like to get rid of the pause. ---------------- A bit of trivia: Australia only been getting comp.sys.amiga again for the last few days after a long break, and only a few sites get it. Its pretty expensive to get from the US. I wish there was more useful stuff in the moderated groups as that was all that was available out here in the past. The user group here in melbourne has currently got about 400 members and publishes a monthly newsletter. Are there any US user groups that publish good newsletters that are worthwhile joining? - perhaps one person could answer this - I dont want to cause the net to be jammed with 50,000 similar answers ... My amiga currently has 2 x 5 inch floppies and a home brew hard disk interface. After finishing writing my own drivers etc, I heard that there had been a similar project on Usenet (which is why I forked out the money to get the news again). Sorry for the length of this - but its been a long time since the last posting! Also, this didn't get out of the machine the first time (or so I was told) so I hope this is not a duplicte. Alan Kent UUCP: seismo!munnari!goanna.oz!ajk Dept of Computing ACSNet: ajk@goanna.oz Royal Melbourne Inst. of Tech. 124 La Trobe St ARPA: munnari!goanna.oz!ajk@SEISMO.ARPA Melbourne, Victoria 3000 AUSTRALIA