Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!apctrc!zgel05
From: zgel05@apctrc.UUCP (George E. Lehmann)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Votrax Vocabulary
Keywords: Votrax SC-01 Vocabulary Phoneme
Message-ID: <534@flyer.apctrc.UUCP>
Date: 13 Sep 88 12:27:02 GMT
References: <1052@bucket.UUCP>
Reply-To: zgel05@flyer.UUCP (George E. Lehmann)
Organization: Amoco Production Co, Tulsa Research Center
Lines: 22

In article <1052@bucket.UUCP> rickb@bucket.UUCP (Rick Bensene) writes:
>I'm looking for a vocabulary of English words for the Votrax SC-01
>speech synthesizer chip.  I've been told that such vocabularies exist,
>
>Failing that, maybe someone has a good set of 'rules' which can be used
>to get reasonable speech quality from ASCII text.  

Votrax themselves made a product surrounding the SC-01 chip called the
Personal Speech Synthesizor.  It connected to a PC (or anything else) via
either Centronics parallel or RS-232, and did remarkably good text-to-speech
conversion from the incoming ASCII stream.  It could easily be fooled by
obvious anomilies in English, but they provided easy escapes to force a
particular pronunciation.  They also included a list of no-no words such as
s**t and f**k which were then pronounced 'sugar' and 'fudge'.  All in all
it was (and may still be, as I bought one about four years ago, but sold it
earlier this year from disuse) a good product.  

BTW, the computer's voice in War Games ("Shall we play a game?") was a Votrax.
-- 
George Lehmann,  ...!uunet!apctrc!zgel05
Amoco Production Co., PO BOX 3385, Tulsa, Ok  74102  ph:918-660-4066
Standard Disclaimer: Contents are my responsibility, not AMOCO's.