[comp.sys.sun] Making your machine talk...

jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen) (11/19/90)

I am trying to build a program that talks to me. Somebody informed me that
there was a discussion about speech programs in this group some time ago.
Could anyone who remembers point me to anything that might be of help:
articles, code fragments, etc...

Please reply by mail, as I don't read this newsgroup regularly.
Thanks,

Een volk dat voor tirannen zwicht	| Oral:     Jack Jansen
zal meer dan lijf en goed verliezen	| Internet: jack@cwi.nl
dan dooft het licht			| Uucp:     hp4nl!cwi.nl!jack

jsb@cs.brown.edu (John Bazik) (11/29/90)

In article <292@brchh104.bnr.ca>, jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen) writes:
|> I am trying to build a program that talks to me. Somebody informed me that
|> there was a discussion about speech programs in this group some time ago.
|> Could anyone who remembers point me to anything that might be of help:
|> articles, code fragments, etc...

I was in on that thread.  Someone remembered a long-ago post of an
english-to-phoneme program.  I have it now, but I haven't had time to play
with it.

The obvious hack is to record all the phonemes and write a backend to
string them together and write them to /dev/audio.

If you want the above mentioned program, send me mail.

John Bazik
jsb@cs.brown.edu

jsb@cs.brown.edu (John Bazik) (12/09/90)

[[Ed's Note: See also related attempts in Misc digest (v9n391). -bdg]]

In article <513@brchh104.bnr.ca>, jsb@cs.brown.edu (John Bazik) writes:

|> I was in on that thread.  Someone remembered a long-ago post of an
|> english-to-phoneme program.  I have it now, but I haven't had time to play
|> with it.
|> 
|> The obvious hack is to record all the phonemes and write a backend to
|> string them together and write them to /dev/audio.
|> 
|> If you want the above mentioned program, send me mail.

Um, no, don't send me any more mail!  Yikes!  I've placed the program on
our anonymous ftp archive:

	host:	wilma.cs.brown.edu (128.148.31.66)
	file:	pub/eng_to_phoneme

This past weekend I wrote the audio part.  It's harder than you might
expect.  Parsing the phonemes and slapping audio samples to the speaker
was easy.  Putting together a set of audio samples that sound okay when
concatenated in various combinations is hard.

I wrote it as libspeak.a and one application, scat (speech cat).  I'll
clean up the code and put it on wilma sometime this week.  It'll be
pub/speak.tar.Z sometime on monday, December 10.

If anyone actually gets quality speech out of this stuff - please let me
know.

John Bazik
jsb@cs.brown.edu

cfreese@super.ORG (Craig F. Reese) (12/09/90)

In article <513@brchh104.bnr.ca> jsb@cs.brown.edu (John Bazik) writes:
>In article <292@brchh104.bnr.ca>, jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen) writes:
>|> I am trying to build a program that talks to me.

>The obvious hack is to record all the phonemes and write a backend to
>string them together and write them to /dev/audio.

I tried this with very limited success (I didn't expect it to work well
anyway).  Here's what I did:

   - Use NRL text->phoneme algorithm
   - segment the phoneme stream into individual phonemes
   - paste together speech segments from digitized recording
     of the phoneme "words" (i.e. beet bit gate...)
   - ship the result to /dev/audio.

It is a fun excercise but don't expect very much.  Its not as good as my
$60 text to speech board that I plug into the RS-232 connector.  If I can
find the time I think it could be made better with some signal processing
hacks.  If anybody has a better version I'd very much like to hear (no pun
intended) about it.

Craig F. Reese                           Email: cfreese@super.org