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Subject: Re: an idea/suggestion

Re: an idea/suggestion

From: BlueChip <cs_bluechip_at_webtribe.net>
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 23:28:42 +0100

As Bjorn says, we currently have no way play uncompressed audio, and this
will not change unless either (a) we are fortunate/skillful enough to get
info from the Terratec firmware or (b) we obtain the/a SDK for the
"Micronas MAS 3587F" and/or "Micronas MAS 3507D" devices
...both of which have become far more likely just recently. But do not be
lulled into unrecoited optimism, for we have not achieved either ...yet!

So in the mean time, the best hope for the blind people is an MP3 Phoneme
Player - this way the issue we have to cover is "text-to-phoneme"
conversion ...there would be a considerable pause or memory overhead (pick
one) for speech to start (depending on method of implementation), but I
imagine that anything would be better than nothing if you are ocularly
downtrodden (or whatever the current P.C. turn-of-phrase is)

Ak'choo'a'lee ...for the menu system we could have a language "blind" which
showed menu items fonetikly ...you could then tweak all you ID3 tags and
there is no need for text-to-phoneme software - oooohhhhhh ...it's
starting to become feasible with what we already have!

M$ speach doofer claims the following phonemes:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/prompting/html/Prompt_phonemes_enu.asp
This one even claims to perform English-to-American translation and
"Spanglish" - LOL
http://www.unifon.org/foneemz44.htm

Bjorn, it's nice to know that we can count you in when we obtain the docs :)

Fred, good to see another Embedded guy programming for us :) What was the
dedicated speech processor used in the Amiga, cos that did some pretty cool
stuff, and it was only a 7MHz 68K ...also, do you think this speech chip
was too powerful to be emulated by our 12MHz SH-1?

BC

P.S. vGreet is still available from the simtel archive, and came up as the
first hit on google :-)

At 15:07 21/09/03 -0500, you wrote:
>Hey Fred,
>I sent a message regarding a program called vGreet earlier, which you may
>not have seen.
>How was this utility able to send synthetic speech through the PC speaker in
>DOS?
>I might still have this utility.
>Glenn.
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Fred Maxwell" <rockbox_at_anti-spam.org>
>To: <rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se>
>Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2003 2:19 PM
>Subject: RE: an idea/suggestion
>
>
>In almost all of those cases, the speech synthesis was done by dedicated
>speech synthesis hardware -- such as the General Instruments SPO256 speech
>synthesis chip that I mentioned in an earlier post. Old video games of the
>1980s often ran on Z80 chips at 4mhz, but they did it with special hardware
>for the sound and graphics. You could not just take a random 4mhz CP/M
>system and make it run Asteroids. Most TiVos use ~50mhz CPUs running Linux,
>but you cannot duplicate the functionality of a TiVo with a generic 50mhz
>486 PC and a copy of RedHat. Even modern systems rely on coprocessor
>cards/chips for 3D video and sound.
>
>By the way, I've been an embedded systems firmware/software engineer since
>1980, so you can bet that I'm not just making this stuff up.
>
>Regards,
> Fred Maxwell
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se
> > [mailto:owner-rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se] On Behalf Of Kevin R. Jones
> > Sent: September 21, 2003 1:20 PM
> > To: rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se
> > Subject: RE: an idea/suggestion
> >
> >
> > I can remember synthetic speech on the apple 2e, or even on
> > one of the old ataris.
> >
> >
> >
Received on 2003-09-22

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