mfontana@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Mark A Fontana) (03/24/91)
Hi all,
I've been following the topic of "cheap text-to-speech boards" and was
considering buying the GI chipset board mentioned a few articles back
to play with, unless anyone has further suggestions.
I intend to get the board to speak Russian, at least as well as possible
using the available phonemes. But intonation in Russian is very important;
will the GI board allow me to vary the intonation within words? In fact,
can the GI board be used in a mode other than straight-English-text-to-
speech? I'm sure I would need to use phonemes directly to get the results
I want. A system in which I could download a phoneme set to the board would
be ideal. If it's possible to change the EPROM without TOO much difficulty,
I guess that's an option.
In the past, I got pretty good results in Russian with S.A.M., the
"Software Automatic Mouth" on an Atari 800. (I believe SAM was also made
for Commodore 64s and Apple IIs). SAM was contained completely in software,
and it had a fairly good phonetic language including 8 levels of intonation.
It was distributed by Don't Ask Software.
If anyone has any comments or recommendations, I'd like to hear them.
- Mark
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| Mark A. Fontana (215)573-8410 | ACCOMPANYING, ANIMATION, PROGRAMMING, DALs |
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