From: msimmons@ec.uwa.oz.au (Michael Simmons - mgmt_staff)
Subject: Re: Talking Desktop Library
Keywords: speech soundblaster text cd-rom
Organization: University of Western Australia
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 06:31:47 GMT

ppaglia@bnr.ca (Peter Paglia P925) in alt.cd-rom writes:

>2) For kicks I fed the text from Poes' THE MAN into my SoundBlasters
>text-to-speech synth. (SB-Talker). Not half bad, especially if you
>echo the text to the screen. 

>What is missing from the SB-Talker application is a intermediate 
>processor, in between the raw ascii and the speech algorithm,
>that contains data on grammar and whole word phonics. This would 
>help to eliminate the monotone/monosylabic sound of current 
>text-to-speech systems, and keep the original ascii text intact.
>( a CD could only hold a few hours of recorded speech w/compression,
>but literally thousands of hours  of speech as ascii text, and 
>still retain its function as a reference)

>The actual speech software would then only need data on the 
>qualities of the selected voice. It might even be possible to
>use a sampled voice to then generate an entire vocabulary.
>(Like a .MOD file does for music) Perhaps in the 
>future, authors would actually specify the vocal parameters
>of thier characters, and of multiple characters. A new book
>(on CD-ROM) would also be an instant 'radio show'.......

I see a couple of possiablities.

(1) Store both the text and highly compressed audio speech, and use an index
	file to link them.

(2) Store the works in a more advanced form (ie Phonic codes + accent
	+ amplitude and frequence envelope codes etc) and use computer
	generated speech. This speech could be generated from highly compressed
	audio or very high quality LPC (Question - is it possiable to LPC
	encode standard audio speech on the fly? , How do they generate the LPC
	data anyway). This should not take more than double the storage of the
	original text since the English language dosn't use the full 256
	possiablities per character. If it came to it you could use huffman
	encoding with a fixed encoding table. 
	I do not believe it is possiable to translate standard ASCII text to
	high quality speech without understanding the contents of the text.

Lets see, if one used 8 bit, 11k sample/sec and then delta compressed (say 30%) as well as compressing the silence between words (say 30%) one should be able toget down to about 5.4kbytes/s.

A CD-ROM should store about 600M/5.4k seconds or 31.6 hours or 56888 words.
A 8Mbyte computer should store about 25 minutes or 758 words (say 2secs a word).

The thing I've noticed is that no-one seem to take pc speech seriously. All of
the programs I have seen are designed to be small memory resident TSR's. What about a proper high quality document to speech convertor.

I feel that reading books from a computer screen will never really take off until everybody has a notebook sized machine with a A4 sized, 300dpi screen. Until then high quality speech might be a better way to deliver CD-ROM Books(Libraries) to the general masses.

Note - I have not had much practical experience with compressed audio so the figures mentioned above are just guesses.

Xref: sparky alt.cd-rom:2897 comp.periphs.scsi:4330