Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!super!udel!princeton!phoenix!dykimber
From: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Better Speech.
Message-ID: <5594@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 19 Jan 89 02:13:47 GMT
References: <4050@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 20

In article <4050@pt.cs.cmu.edu> mjw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Witbrock) writes:
>Using digitised phones to generate Amiga's speech would make things worse,
>not better. Guaranteed. 
>
>However, there may be another way to skin this cat. 
>
>In a recent tech report, Terry Sejnowski at JHU described an experiment with 
>an artificial 'neural' network which learns to pronounce English words. 
[description of NETTalk techreport ref deleted]

When I heard NETTalk, it wasn't a heck of a lot better sounding than the
amiga in terms of intonation.  It's main asset is that it's good at learning
what sounds to make based on an window of text (and it doesn't always sound
like a native speaker).  Perhaps a better way to apply backprop learning to
getting the amiga to talk would be to train it on a corpus of phonetic
transcriptions, to learn intonation.  Or the two could be used in tandem.
The question is really whether or not it'll work in real time.  I don't
think it will.

                                                  -Dan