Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!purdue!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!mha From: mha@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Mark H. Anbinder) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Whence goeth Macintalk? Keywords: Macintalk Message-ID: <6399@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: 23 Sep 88 23:53:08 GMT References: <6317@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <5444@zodiac.UUCP> <1129@usfvax2.EDU> <2435@spray.CalComp.COM> Reply-To: mha@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Mark H. Anbinder) Organization: Department of Media Services, Cornell University, Ithaca NY Lines: 39 In article <2435@spray.CalComp.COM> anson@spray.UUCP (Ed Anson) writes: >So far, I've seen a lot of debate about whether Macintalk still works. But >it never did work particularly well... >Has anyone found a speech synthesizer for the Mac that sounds like real speech? >Or is someone working on one? I asked the original question about why my copies of Macintalk weren't working on my Mac II. According to most of the responses, I've just been using an old version, though there's some question as to whether the latest version is compatible with various recent incarnations of the system software. In any case, I always felt that Smoothtalker, which stopped working for me when I upgraded my first Mac from 512K to Plus, had a more natural-sounding speech algorithm than Macintalk did. Which of course wasn't saying much. Now that we've got the Mac II, with its high processing speed and powerful sound generation capabilities, someone SHOULD be working on REALLY natural sounding speech. Utilizing segments of digitized human speech could be appropriate here. Or just studying them and implementing a generator based on them would be fine. As a linguist (by education if not career) myself, I understand the inherent difficulties in producing natural-sounding speech. It won't be easy. I wish I were a better Macintosh programmer and had a couple of extra hours a day; then maybe I'd tackle it. For now, I'm waiting patiently for someone else to get around to it. Seems to me that Apple should be taking steps to bring Macintalk up to date. Adding a female voice at this point would be a good idea! Smoothtalker had menu options for a female voice and several different accents, none of which were ever (to my knowledge) actually implemented. Any comers? -- Mark H. Anbinder ** MHA@TCGould.tn.cornell.edu NG33 MVR Hall, Media Services Dept. ** THCY@CRNLVAX5.BITNET Cornell University H: (607) 257-7587 ******** Ithaca, NY 14853 W: (607) 255-1566 ******* Ego ipse custodies custudio