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From: jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Long Live Macintalk!
Message-ID: <1990Mar10.102957.12174@santra.uucp>
Date: 10 Mar 90 10:29:57 GMT
References: <14377@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system)
Reply-To: jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, FINLAND
Lines: 33

bskendig@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Brian Kendig) writes:
>Is there any way that Apple can be persuaded to revamp MacinTalk for
>System 7?

I don't think that Macintalk is worth it anymore. I think it belongs
in the same category as the original MacWrite. (Weird hacks that are
fully understood only by the people who wrote them.)

>Are there any developers out there who would be willing to achieve
>instant fame and fortune by either revamping MacinTalk, or by creating
>a new (compatible?) speech synthesizer program for the Mac?

A Finnish team just demonstrated their Finnish Macinpuhe (Macintalk in
Finnish) system. I don't know if it's Macintalk-compatible, but it does
a lot more than Macintalk used to do. It comes with a cdev that speaks
most things that you do with a Mac (like menu selections, opening files,
changing windows, clipboard contents, buttons, ...)

The driver comes with three predefined voices and they say it takes
about a week to create a new voice. One of the voices is even quite
understandable.  Maybe these people could be persuaded (with money &
fame) to write something that can speak English. Their software is
microphoneme (sp?) based, so they would just need the rules to convert
text to phonemes. The current conversion is probably too simple for
English, since Finnish is written almost phonetically.

Please note that they have written the system from the ground up. They
didn't use anything from the old Macintalk.

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|     Juri Munkki jmunkki@hut.fi  jmunkki@fingate.bitnet        I Want   Ne   |
|     Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre        My Own   XT   |
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