Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!ulowell!page
From: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: better speech (was: WB 1.4)
Message-ID: <11263@swan.ulowell.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 89 18:44:04 GMT
References: <156@corpane.UUCP>
Reply-To: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Lowell, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 44

sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) wrote:
>The synthetic voice Amy has now sux.

You're probably using the translator.library (the text-to-phoneme
library) which has a lot of rough spots, especially stress and
inter-phoneme pauses.  If you pick your own phonemes (or adjust what
comes from the translator.library) you'll be surprised at how much
better you can do with the narrator.device (the phoneme-to-speech
part).  Of course you need to spend some time with the params of the
narrator.device too.

>It sounds like a transvestite swedish chef.

Some of my best friends are transvestite Swedish chefs.	:-)  It also
sounds like it's holding its nose.

>The Amiga has enough potential power to have a really nice synthesized 
>...
>digital samples of his voice to make the phonemes. It needs a lot of 

Well, if it's sampled, it isn't synthesized.

>should be able to be as good as say, DECTALK, with a little bit of work. 

And a lot of custom DSP hardware, a ton of memory, and lots of CPU
time.  DECTALK uses two pronunciation dictionaries, a library of
letter-to-sound rules, and a large rules database for intonation,
duration word stress, as well as such stuff as "breathiness", "head
size" and "laryngealization".  It converts the phonemes to control
messages every 6.4ms, and sends this information through the D/A at
10k samples/sec.

You need a synthesizer to do all this, a digitized phoneme library
won't cut it, as you lose all the stresses and other nuances of
speech.

I'm not defending the current Amiga's voice capabilities, just
pointing out that building a great generalized text-to-voice
capability in software is very hard.

..Bob
-- 
Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept.  page@swan.ulowell.edu  ulowell!page
Have five nice days.