-=> Mike Ross said to Greg Mayman
 -=> about "TALKING BOOKS" on 12-13-02  09:55.....


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

Back in about '88 we had a text-to-speech program on the Mac that
could interpret most words correctly -- but with an American
accent -- but for unusual words or where you wanted more of an
English accent (John pronounced more as Jawn rather than Jahn)
you could use spell the words phonetically. Not strictly phonem
controlled but close.

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

The unit I saw was a complete system with a dedicated computer.
IIRC the monitor showed what the scanner was looking at which
would have helped a partially sighted person line the text up
properly. But like most dedicated systems it cost a lot more than
a general purpose system such as a PC running suitable software.

I believe that there are some Windoze programs around in the last
few years that can convert scanned images of text into true text,
even programs that convert images of hand-written text!

But IMO it's still a pretty good trick to be able to do it with a
reasonably small number of errors.

From Greg Mayman, in beautiful Adelaide, South Australia

... If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. - Derek Bok
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