ajk@goanna.UUCP (02/09/87)
I had noticed some articles on the narrator device, so I thought I would
add a few of my wishes/experiences/problems.
I have been trying to get the narrator to talk Thai. I have written
a program which allows words and sentences to be entered in Thai and
English and quiz me on them. The Amiga was good in a number of ways
(having intution for building the interface, having fonts so I could
build up a Thai font - which is not as easy as english!).
For the fun of it I tried to get it to speak Thai but came up with the
following problems.
(1) Thai has (approx) 33 vowel sounds and 44 consonants (this includes
a lot of duplicates however). The narrator simply cannot do them all,
although some could be made from stringing others together. I have
to be careful of examples given in books too as they all have
American accents! (I am in Australia)
(2) Thai is a tonal language - each syllable has a different meaning
if it is pronounced with a rising, falling, low, middle or high tone.
The length of the sound is also important. Each word can also have
a number of syllables. To get complete control of tone and duration
I have been sending one syllable at a time to the narrator. The
narrator unfortunately puts a pause at the end of each syllable
(or at the beginning - I am not sure) but makes very disjoint speach.
A 'build your own phoneme' device would be extremely useful to get the
phonemes right, but better tonal and duration control would also be useful.
The way I tricked the narrator into doing the tones for me was for the
constant tones (low, middle, high) to use the robotic voice, and for
the rising and falling to use the natural voice and placing a '?' or
'.' at the end of the syllable (which also may be causing the pause).
I have not tried to use the stress marks for tonal control yet.
Has anyone done so? I didnt think I would be able to get two
rising tones right next to each other from it (rising tones always
start from the same tone).
Any help, suggestions, comments anyone? I really would like to get rid
of the pause.
----------------
A bit of trivia:
Australia only been getting comp.sys.amiga again
for the last few days after a long break, and only a few sites get it.
Its pretty expensive to get from the US. I wish there was more useful stuff
in the moderated groups as that was all that was available out here in
the past.
The user group here in melbourne has currently got about 400 members
and publishes a monthly newsletter. Are there any US user groups that
publish good newsletters that are worthwhile joining? - perhaps one
person could answer this - I dont want to cause the net to be jammed
with 50,000 similar answers ...
My amiga currently has 2 x 5 inch floppies and a home brew hard disk
interface. After finishing writing my own drivers etc, I heard that
there had been a similar project on Usenet (which is why I forked out
the money to get the news again).
Sorry for the length of this - but its been a long time since the last
posting! Also, this didn't get out of the machine the first time
(or so I was told) so I hope this is not a duplicte.
Alan Kent UUCP: seismo!munnari!goanna.oz!ajk
Dept of Computing ACSNet: ajk@goanna.oz
Royal Melbourne Inst. of Tech.
124 La Trobe St ARPA: munnari!goanna.oz!ajk@SEISMO.ARPA
Melbourne, Victoria 3000
AUSTRALIArodney@bhpese.bhpese.oz (Rodney Lewis) (08/10/88)
I have a problem with narrator device. I am sending a simple text message to several Amigas and want the narrator to speak it out when it arrives. However, I also have several other tasks running as well, some at priorites 3 and 4. The result is that the narrator speaks with an unacceptable stutter as it is at priority 0. I have tried setting the priority of the narrator above that of these other tasks but it keeps getting changed back to 0 for some unknown reason (to me anyway). I have tried SetTaskPri, i have tried doing the IO request to the narrator from a task running at a higher priority, and i have tried setting the priority in the IO request structure and the reply port. Nothing seems to work. The narrator priority ALWAYS gets set back to 0. Anybody got any ideas, solutions, or reasons as to why this is happening? Any help appreciated. Thanks Rodney ACSnet: rodney@bhpese.oz.AU
koster@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Herbert West) (08/13/88)
[He has problems with the narrator device getting put back at pri = 0, so it stutters] I don't know how to use the narrator, but maybe you can Forbid() and Permit() critical sections?
goren@bimacs.BITNET (goren yoram) (12/05/90)
I'd like to teach the narrator to speak Hebrew.
(When it is done, it will be PD).
Especially I need help in the following topics:
1. How to write a "device" for the Amiga.
2. How to convert words into their phonetics (are there special rules,
plus some special words, and some rules how to split long words that
start with "dis" or end with "tion"?, or is there some other algorithm).
3. How to add the intonation (sp?) to the sentence - when to raise
the voice, and when to lower it.
4. Can I add it to the existing device (so it can talk both Hebrew
and English).
5. Any other help which might be important.
Thanks,
Goren
--
BITNET goren@bimacs
Arpanet goren%bimacs.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu
UUCP ...!psuvax1!bimacs.bitnet!goren or:
...!uunet!goren@bimacs.bitnet
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Always look on the bright side of life.... |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------