Re: keynote gold tts revival
the following is an email i got from Tim Hughes, maker of software keynote gold multimedia. so, the next question is. a. i have to see if tim can help me register this keynote gold demo that i have. and b. would it be possible to have NVDA communicate with keynote gold running either in a windows CE emulator, windows95-vm, or windows3.1 inside talking dosbox? now I am off to ask tim if he can at least help me register the demo software that i have installed in talking dosbox.
Hi Joshua,
From your emails, my understanding is that you really want a genuine Keynote Gold voice using a sapi5 interface so that the voice can be used in modern versions of Windows for any application that uses text to speech, including screen readers and the like. You want Keynote Gold because it is fast and responsive, and the voice is familiar and brings back warm memories from your youth years ago, when it was very enabling in your life. You are not alone in this desire: there are plenty of blind friends who also love the sound of Keynote Gold.
I can understand why you would want all of that.
Thanks for the comments about the synthesiser’s responsiveness. When I wrote the software-only package for Keynote, that was my top goal, as I knew it was important from my market research. I’m glad the result worked as expected. I got a kick out of doing it, because it was technically challenging, and the result was very robust and also clean and simple - an engineering work of art. So, I like the old synthesiser too.
Regrettably, to change some other synthesiser to sound like Keynote would be an exercise in frustration, massively time consuming, and unlikely to be perfect. I’m not in a position to tackle a job like that.
The two options you have would be:
(a) whoever owns the rights to Keynote Gold right now, could repackage it into a sapi5 interface. Having written the original packaging for Windows 95 and the like, I know that this is possible technically. Again, it would be a reasonable sized job, probably 3 to 12 man months minimum, and so it would cost roughly $100k to $250k for development, without any marketing/distribution tasks. Again, I’m not in a position to do this, however if the demand is there, and enough people are willing to contribute, who knows?
(b) finding a way (you will need software developers to help) to use the Keynote gold running in the emulator to receive input from the sapi5 interface in Windows. This sounds really clunky but there may be ways of simplifying the problem. Obviously, I don’t recommend this idea, but sometimes it turns out that the pieces of the puzzle exist.
Again, I’m not in a position to tackle any of these tasks. There may be hobbyist software enthusiast who would like to however, and I wish you well in locating them.
I do have one question — how did you manage to get in touch? It’s a small world, and I’m always interested in the way in which the connections between people are made.
Good luck,
Kind regards
Tim
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