On 2018-03-18, Dennis Lee Bieber  wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Mar 2018 20:12:48 +0000, druck  declaimed the
> following:
>
>
>>Speech synthesis, as opposed to speech recognition, is not very
>>processor intensive. The synthetic ones require the most computation,
>>and the natural voice ones are more dependent on memory bandwidth and
>>storage latency.
>>
>>We were able to run many synths on 200MHz iPaq StrongARM PDAs and had
>>all the big name synthetic and natural voice synthesisers running on
>>easily on early 400MHz XScale Windows CE mobile phones. Even a Pi1
>>wouldn't have problems running those, and I suspect should also be able
>>to cope with the latest versions.
>>
>
>  The 8MHz Commodore Amiga used to have translator (converted normal text
> to encoded phonemes [numeric intonation data and conversion of "c" to "s"
> or "k" as appropriate) and narrator device. However, I think they lost the
> distribution license for the libraries by the time of AmigaOS 3. The
> synthesizer device had the ability to return height and width data to a
> running program, intended, I'm sure, to allow the program to animate a
> mouth to match the syllables.

To be fair, IIUC, at least the early Amigas had some
special-purpose hardware assistance (the Copper and a
couple of other chips) rather than doing _everything_ in
software.  My older daughter was a little non-plussed that
it pronounced her name Jen-knife-er when doing from plain
text to speech.

Interestingly, I was thinking just this morning about the
early Amigas' ability to synthesize music (four-voice,
IIRC) mixed with pre-recorded vocals off a ~1.8-2.0MB
floppy.

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

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