"Greg Mayman" wrote to "Mike Ross" (12 Dec 02  08:08:00)
 --- on the topic of "TALKING BOOKS"

 -=> Mike Ross said to Robert Sayre
 -=> about "TALKING BOOKS" on 12-09-02  21:56.....

 MR> What about text to speech software? I remember the SB16 had something

 GM> About 12 years ago at a computer show, I saw a scanner linked to
 GM> a computer running text-to-speech software, where you could place
 GM> a book or other printed matter under the scanner and the machine
 GM> would read each line aloud. The program for converting the
 GM> scanned images to text must have been pretty good too.

 GM> But IIRC the price was in the tens of thousands of dollars. A lot
 GM> more expensive than a cassette player.

I just fired up that 486 with the SB16 sound card in it and ran the
speech software to remember what it did. BTW, I had recalled it wrong,
the name of the program wasn't SoundoLE. It was TextLE and the whole
text to speech group was titled Text Assist in the Win programs menu.
Actually it works quite nicely and sounds much better than the text to
speech thing we are familiar from Stephen Hawking in a wheelchair fame.
This Text Assist actually puts some sing-song inflection and some
expression into the text being read.

In fact there is a demo of the ability of the programmed voices to
literally sing songs. It's a bit of a stiff delivery but it does hit the
notes. I wanted to try my hand at writing up a song but the macros are
rather cumbersome in that the words have to be split up into phonemes
such as WE becomes WIY and things like that. Pitch seems a bugger too as
it looks to be tied to the duration but maybe I understood that wrong.

OTOH speech to text is actually quite easy since it comes with a ready
made dictionary and doesn't seem to need tweaking. There are about half
a dozen preprogrammed: voices, men, women, a kid even, and new ones can
be created too. You can change the speed, the pitch, the pauses, and
various other speech components. It actually all works relatively
seamlessly. In fact I find it excellent for a piece of bundled software
which doesn't cost thousands of dollars but then again as you stated
that was 12 years ago. Only thing is how that program converted picture
images to descriptive speech is way beyond this program's abilities. 

 Mike
 ****

... When I was your age, we carved transistors out of wood.
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