info-mac@uw-beaver (12/21/84)
From: Steven B. Munson <sbm@Purdue.ARPA>
I just got the speech synthesizer program (ABSpeak) from the
network. What fun! By the way, is the speaking of phonemes built into
the Macintosh in ROM, or was this all done in the program? Anyway, this
makes me think of a couple of things I would like to be able to do with
the Macintosh (does Apple read this mailing list?).
I would *love* to have this capability inside MacTerminal (not a
complaint, but a suggestion for the next release), so that the back-end
machine could send the Macintosh an escape sequence followed by a bunch
of phonemes and the Mac would speak them. Something like what macput
does to send commands to the Macintosh (how does it do that, anyway?).
Then, with a program on the back-end machine to translate clear text
into phonemes, we could have things like a biff-like thing that tells
us, "Steve, frobaz just sent you mail about fun with Macintosh," or a
cron job that tells us every Tuesday and Thursday at 3:20, "you have a
meeting in 10 minutes." I wouldn't mind MacTerminal being 30K bigger
if it had this capability (that's how big ABSpeak is).
Actually, this would be an excellent thing to have in the
Blit-like interface that I heard someone is creating (does anyone know
anything more specific about this, or when it will be available?). I
assume the back-end machine would send packets of characters to the
Macintosh with headers saying which window they go to, so just create a
new address that means "these are to be spoken." The possibilities are
endless! Let's get hacking!
Steve Munson
sbm@purdue.arpa
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