wagner (11/07/82)
Has anyone built the Microvox speech synthesizer in September BYTE? Or bought the put together one (Intex-Talker?)? I am interested in getting one if it produces reasonable speach. I would be interested in hearing anything from ease of building (I can build kits; being a software type doesnt seem to prevent me from picking up the soldering iron by the cold end) to interfacing to driving software to comments on its ascii-to-speach-by-rule algorithms. And has anyone (tee-hee) got it working reading net news in the morning so that they can "hear" the net news while making coffee? I can see where filtering out the notesfiles gibberish might be more necessary than it is on a screen! And the from line might need re-interpretation: I dont really think I want to hear that this is From decvax exclamation-mark u t z o o exclamation-mark u t c s s t a t exclamation-mark wagner Please mail to me; I will (goes without saying, but we say it anyways) summarize if there is sufficient interest. Michael Wagner, UTCS (UUCP address pronounced by as-yet unpurchased speach synthesizer above)
michaelk@sri-unix (11/09/82)
I have sent net-news through my Votrax type'n talk text to speech synthesizer, and it is quite amusing. You can generally follow the text ok, except for the occasional abbreviation (which it "pronounces"), and then there is the return address header (which it also reads). Someday I may write a filter for stripping the header, & perhaps correct a few of the more commonly net-used words that it mispronounces. Perhaps we can have a net.xxxx.votrax version of groups in which everyone spells phonetically (as some folk already do -- please, no flames) on purpose. Meanwhile, as I mentioned above, listening to net.news is interesting and amusing -- but slow. Mike Kersenbrock Tektronix Aloha, Oregon