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