rickb@bucket.UUCP (Rick Bensene) (09/12/88)
I'm looking for a vocabulary of English words for the Votrax SC-01 speech synthesizer chip. I've been told that such vocabularies exist, and I'm hoping that someone out there has a copy of such sitting around in machine readable form somewhere. I'm not very good at constructing reasonable sounding phoneme streams 'by ear', and it takes a considerable amount of time and fine tuning to get the words to sound at all aesthetically correct, even considering the fact that the SC-01 is fairly old technology and even at it's best, the speech isn't tremendously lifelike. Hopefully I can save quite a bit of time on my application by being able to rely on someone else who spent the time to devise a good vocabulary for the chip. Failing that, maybe someone has a good set of 'rules' which can be used to get reasonable speech quality from ASCII text. I saw some such rules in an article in a long-since forgotten publication (maybe BYTE?) a number of years ago, but haven't been able to find any reference to it in my recent searching. Any help or information that could be provided will be very much appreciated. Thank you, Rick Bensene Tektronix, Inc. PO Box 3500 C1-970 Vancouver, WA 98668 ..tektronix!tekigm2!rickb (work) Voice: (206) 253-5489 (10A-5P Pacific) ..tektronix!teksce!bucket!rickb (home) BBS: (503) 254-0458 300/1200 -- Rick Bensene Tektronix, Inc. PO Box 3500 C1-970 Vancouver, WA 98668 ..tektronix!tekigm2!rickb (work) Voice: (206) 253-5489 (10A-5P Pacific) ..tektronix!teksce!bucket!rickb (home) BBS: (503) 254-0458 300/1200
zgel05@apctrc.UUCP (George E. Lehmann) (09/13/88)
In article <1052@bucket.UUCP> rickb@bucket.UUCP (Rick Bensene) writes: >I'm looking for a vocabulary of English words for the Votrax SC-01 >speech synthesizer chip. I've been told that such vocabularies exist, > >Failing that, maybe someone has a good set of 'rules' which can be used >to get reasonable speech quality from ASCII text. Votrax themselves made a product surrounding the SC-01 chip called the Personal Speech Synthesizor. It connected to a PC (or anything else) via either Centronics parallel or RS-232, and did remarkably good text-to-speech conversion from the incoming ASCII stream. It could easily be fooled by obvious anomilies in English, but they provided easy escapes to force a particular pronunciation. They also included a list of no-no words such as s**t and f**k which were then pronounced 'sugar' and 'fudge'. All in all it was (and may still be, as I bought one about four years ago, but sold it earlier this year from disuse) a good product. BTW, the computer's voice in War Games ("Shall we play a game?") was a Votrax. -- George Lehmann, ...!uunet!apctrc!zgel05 Amoco Production Co., PO BOX 3385, Tulsa, Ok 74102 ph:918-660-4066 Standard Disclaimer: Contents are my responsibility, not AMOCO's.
thad@cup.portal.com (09/14/88)
You're in luck (re: Votrax vocabulary). I used to use those a lot; were quite impressive at trade shows and the like. What I did was acquire a copy of the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of the English Language, International Edition. This contains(ed) the IPA (Int'l Phonetic Alphabet) for the pronunciation of all the words in the dictionary. Using that book, I was able to constuct phrases and sentences that sounded decent on the first try; then a little tweaking would bring the speech right into line. Re: some references on Votrax vocabulary building: Bell System Technical Journal, vol.60, No. 7, Sept.1981, pp. 1621-1631 Heathkit Voice Synthesis Kit (includes chips, too!) BYTE, September 1981, Ciarcia's column, page 38 BYTE, Feb. 1981, page 164 ELECTRONICS, Feb 10, 1981, page 118 BYTE, June 1981, page 384 BYTE, June 1981, page 46 (Ciarcia) BYTE, Feb. 1981, page 36 ELECTRONICS, Feb 10, 1981, page 122 ELECTRONICS, April 10, 1980, page 113 ELECTRONICS, August 31, 1978, page 109 Those refs are all to articles beginning on the cited page(s). I had (have?) programs on DECSYSTEM-20, C64, and several homebrews, all using the SC-01 chip to great effect. Good luck with your project! Thad Floryan [thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ...!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad]