jww@sdcsvax.UUCP (Joel West) (07/25/85)
(side note from previous article: > An Apple rep (I'll have to check my notes) said > tech support would be via Delphi. Dan Cochran, head of Development tools and languages, MacWorld Expo, Feb. 22, 1985.....) One of the niftiest things in the "May" supplement is on disk "5/85 MacStuff 3" in the folder "MacinTalk 1.1". Put it in right away. The application "SpeechLab" allows you to type in arbitrary text. It starts at 150 words/minute and 95 HZ base frequency. At about 300 HZ you get a boy or womanly sound. You can also choose "natural" or "robotic" intonation. The psuedo-human is too wildly fluctuating for my taste, and even the monotone isn't flat enough for mine. One nice feature is that there is an "exception list" for manual choice of English->phonetic spelling translation. ("broadcasting" pronounces the "oa" as a phoneme rather than a short "ah") Also, you can tweak the phonetic spelling once and assure fairly repeatable pronunciation. Without reading the manual (out of 300 pages, only skimming) it appears that the "MacinTalk" driver (with a ZSYS icon) can be bundled with just about anything. The manual describes entry points for both "English" and "phonetic" input. SpeechLab has dimmed options for "female", "french", "italian", etc. I assume the updated version will be available via MAUG. :-( Joel West CACI, Inc. - Federal (c/o UC San Diego) {ucbvax,decvax,ihnp4}!sdcsvax!jww jww@SDCSVAX.ARPA