murphy@pur-phy (William J. Murphy) (07/19/89)
This morning I had breakfast with my wife (a speech pathologist), two other speech- pathologists, and a specialist in augmentative communication devices. The specialist workd for a company called Phonic-Ear which makes a portable keyboard like device which synthesizes speech for speech and language impaired people. After listening to the product, I felt that the Amiga does a better job at producing synthetic speech and thought that it would be possible to generate a program which brings up a custom screen with various icons or gadgets which could be clicked on to provide speech. This is almost trivial with IconX and the Speak: handler, but it works. My question/problem is that my Amiga 2000 is hardly portable, so I would like to know if there is a way to make an A500 portable by providing an LCD touch screen. If not a touch screen, how about just an LCD? I know that some of you hardware hackers have tried touch screens, what about touch screens, and battery packs. Commodore, I know that you are not in the augmentative communication business, but there are thousands of children and adults who could benefit from your technology. $4000 for this portable Phonic-Ear Voice 160 is outrageous, and can certainly be beat by adding a $500 touch screen to an A500. The software is essentially free if AR*xx is to be bundled with 1.4. 8^). Well, just an idea, but one which would make some real inroads in the educational market and would start to train our youngsters on what a real computer can do. Bill Murphy murphy@newton.physics.purdue.edu
rap@peck.ardent.com (Rob Peck) (07/21/89)
In article <2374@pur-phy> murphy@newton.physics.purdue.edu.UUCP (William J. Murphy) writes: > >This morning I had breakfast with my wife (a speech pathologist), >two other speech- pathologists, and a specialist in augmentative >communication devices. The specialist workd for a company called >Phonic-Ear which makes a portable keyboard like device which synthesizes >speech for speech and language impaired people. After listening >to the product, I felt that the Amiga does a better job at producing >synthetic speech and thought that it would be possible to generate >a program which brings up a custom screen with various icons or gadgets >which could be clicked on to provide speech. > Is it the ultimate in vaporware when someone writes (almost) all of the manual first, then, knowing how to explain the product, one begins to implement it? Then of course the manual matches the product because after all, it WAS the spec. Well, as a means of sparking a few folks ideas, here is the Preface for a manual for a product that is now utilitarian (it DOES work now, but has nowhere near the features that the full manual describes). What I HAVE functioning is a program that takes as many file names as one wishes, such as: Speak4Me file1 file2 file3 ... fileN with each file composed of text lines, max 40 lines for now, done by any word processor program. Each text line of the form: 1:nose/My Nose Is Running!/Z 2:klenx/Can you please get me a Kleenex?/Z where field 1 is a numeric field, ignored; field 2 is an abbreviation that appears in a gadget box on the window (1 of 40 boxes for now); field 3 is the expansion of that translation, which can be fed to the Translator library. Field 4 (now occupied by the "Z") is reserved... if it is blank, when you double click an abbreviation, the translator library is called with field 3 to get what to say and the narrator device says the phrase. If this field contains a "!" as the first character, the ascii phrase that is in field 4 is a tweaked translation and should be left alone. If this field contains a '"' as the first character, then the field contains a pathname to a sampled sound in 8SVX format that should be "played" instead of using the speech device. Clicking once instead of twice on an abbreviation brings up the text of field 2 in a window so that the user can determine whether this is really what they want to say. Other gadgets in the window allow editing and so on of the various fields. For the curious, here is just the Preface of the manual. --- The Speech Project Copyright 1989, Robert A Peck, All rights reserved --- ================== --- --- --- Assistance for the Speech-Impaired --- ---------------------------------- --- --- This program is designed to provide an easy method for a --- speech-impaired person (who may also be physically impaired) --- to use the Amiga Personal Computer to issue speech. --- --- The program uses either the Mouse or the Keyboard --- as its input device and uses the screen to provide --- visual feedback. You can attach an inexpensive audio amplifier --- to the Amiga to use as the output device. Anything you can --- do from the keyboard you can also do from the mouse. --- --- The program uses the built-in Amiga text to speech --- capability. But it is possible to substitute --- sampled speech or other sampled sounds in place of --- the built-in speech, especially if you are able to get --- by on only a fixed subset of phrases. The built-in --- speech capability is retained as a backup to the --- sampled sound playback capability. --- --- The program is easy to use and easy to modify. --- A HELP facility is included. --- --- --- Organization of the Manual --- --------------------------- --- This manual is organized as follows: --- --- Chapter 1 - General Description - gives general details --- about the program operation --- --- Chapter 2 - Mouse Operations - shows how to use the --- program exclusively from the Amiga mouse. --- --- Chapter 3 - Keyboard Operations - shows how to use the --- program exclusively from the Amiga keyboard. --- --- Chapter 4 - About Sampled Sound - adding sampled sound --- capability to the Amiga speech device. --- --- Chapter 5 - Reference Materials --- --- --- Any command can be selected and operated exclusively by keyboard --- or mouse. However, you can, if you wish, use a combination of --- keyboard and mouse actions. The mouse and keyboard chapters --- individually cover the actions that each can cause. The idea of gadgets to be clicked on are described in the second article I did for Compute's Amiga Resource -- one big gadget with a whole lot of subgadgets managed by the program directly. And for the second issue of the Transactor, I added an AREXX port to SpeechToy so that I'd have an independent program to which I could send a phrase or its translation and/or allow the user to adjust and save (in the icon toolstrings) the speech parameters (speed, pitch, male/female, robotic/natural and so on). What I still need is the source to a few file requesters so that I can adapt them to operate COMPLETELY from either a mouse or a keyboard. Most file requesters I have seen use BOTH, but not one or the other. I did figure out how to do a mouse-only-typing of letters etc (no, it does NOT use 26 letter gadgets), but the file requester thing would appear to be what'll take a while to do right. And maybe the file requester should be an AREXX goodie so I can just patch things together as I need them. I'd be interested in hearing from folks who might have ideas along this line. As with the Audiotools, this is likely to be a continuing project with updates available from time to time. I am in position to release current material in object code form, so as to get feedback from actual users (I have two acquaintences who have had strokes, who may or may not find the current incarnation of the program useful or interesting). But source code, and the full manual, I think will have to wait a while, till I've completed a bit more of the project. Rob Peck