From: jmh@coyote.datalog.com (John Hughes)
Subject: Re: WANTED: ms-dos text-to-speech
Organization: Datalog Consulting, Tucson, AZ
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 92 11:12:45 GMT

In article <1992Oct2.060425.18579@uc.msc.edu> eab@msc.edu (Edward Bertsch) writes:
>I am curious as to if there is any software available for ibm compatible
>machines running DOS (or window for that matter) that will do text to
>speech.  Ideally, it would be 'sampled' speech as opposed to that nasty
>sounding synthesized speech.  Also ideally, it would not require any
>additional hardware (i.e. it could use the built in speaker) but could
>take advantage of (for example) a sound blaster if it were present.

There are some PD/Shareware things running about that try to do phonetic
construction using sampled phonemes. I don't recall the file names right
off, but I seem to recall seeing several in the SIMTEL mirror at
wuarchive.wustl.edu. You might also try Compuserve or BIX.

You have some basic problems to deal with, though. Building a sampled
vocab of complete words is a mammoth task. Not only are there thousands
of possible words to consider, but even at low sample rates the amount
of disk space required for a modest vocab. would be huge. Then, too,
one has to get the words onto the disk in the first place, and any way
you want to cut it that means some kind of analog-to-digital conversion.

I've written apps for the Bigmouth voice mail card, which is basically
an 8-bit, 8Khz sample/playback card with a telco interface and DTMF stuff
on it to handle touchtones. I think that Artisoft also makes such a
critter. On a 10Mhz or better AT class machine it doesn't sound too
bad for voice, not so great for music (the upper roll-off is around the
same as for the phone system, something like 3.5Khz). One app. used a
stock set of words and phrases to interface a dial-in phone number to
a special purpose database. There were about 150 words and phrases,
and the voice data files alone consumed something like 8 megs of
disk space (and I spent damn near three days talking all that stuff
onto the disk and then redoing it to get the inflections right so that
the system could make natural sounding sentences out of it all).

>It could be a stand alone program, although something integrated into
>terminal software would be very good.  (the intended application is
>for a blind guy interested in using a bbs)

You might find that the available PC stuff is going to sound crude, at
best. The speaker on a PC is not the greatest audio output device ever
designed, since there's no amplitude control and only one channel for
whatever frequency its programmed to generate. The audio output always
has a raspy sound to it (most of what I've heard is unintelligible).
Also, the programs that claim to take ASCII files as input often have
trouble with plain ol' ASCII - they want to see some special codes
and modified spellings to handle the phoneme decoding.

I personally can't see any way to avoid adding some A/D-D/A hardware
of some kind to do this sort of thing. But, maybe someone has figured
out how to get a PC speaker to operate as an audio output with
reasonable quality. I sort of doubt it, though; there's only so much
that one can torture limited hardware into doing.

>Thanks a bunch,
>
>Ed
[sig deleted]


-John


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Newsgroups: comp.speech