Making your machine talk...

[Craig F. Reese]

In article <513 at brchh104.bnr.ca> jsb at cs.brown.edu (John Bazik) writes:
>In article <292 at brchh104.bnr.ca>, jack at 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 at super.org