OK, guys, I know, this has got nothing much to do with Window-Eyes itself to do. At least, not directly. Still, I thought it might interest some of you, just for the fun of it.
First of all, let me clearly state, I am no chess game player, and don't really have much knowledge about that game. Furthermore, I have no clue if the story here rendered, really is true. But the word is saying, that the guy who invented the game of chess, took it to the king locally. The king was quite excited about the game, and wanted to buy it from the inventor. He, on his part, replied the king, saying: "Allright, I will sell it to you. For the first field on the board, I want ONE grain. For the second field, I want TWO grains. The ghird field, will cost you FOUR grains; the fourth has the price of EIGHT grains. For every field, I want a price, twice the price of the former. - If you can pay me all 64 fields of the board, I will let you have the game." Not sure, which kind of grain they were doing - be Wheat, Barley, or whatever. Thing is, if the story goes right, the king had no chance to bring out that number of grains. Anyone knows, how many grains are in a pound of Wheat? Smile. I have no clue, but when realizing the number of grains in question, it must turn into a few ton. Quite a few, actually. OK, so today, i decided to put the speech synths on my computer to a real "stress-test". I made a quick worksheet in MSExcel, and had it do all the mathematical calculations. The chart, you will find cited below. Then, I ran down the columns, letting the speech synthesizer read out the numbers to me. My idea was, to see how far down in the chart, I could have the synth read the amount as a full number. And here, is the real interesting part of the project. Some synths, ran down to the 50th field, and from field number 51, it would start to read out single digits. The worst synth, only managed the seven first fields, before she would start reading single digits. That was the CereVoice Kathrine. The most of the voices, Scansoft and NeoSpeech (Kate and Paul), managed full number reading, on nothing higher than field number 50. Best in test, was the AT&T voices (Crystal and Mike), along with the well-known Eloquence Reed - They managed even field number 61, before they had to give in, and start performing in single-digit mode. Speaking of Eloquence, here is an intersting pint, which does stress the fact of differences between individual voices, even inside one and same synthesizer. Eloquence Reed and Sandy, both US voices, both performed full number reading, down through field 61. But, switching to the German voice Max, from Eloquence, you could not get anything below field number 40, before he gave up his full number reading. All the above testing, was performed with the screen reader set to "numbers = synthesizer". Changing this setting, and letting Window-Eyes take care of the number interpretation (Numbers = ON), None of the synths would perform full-numbers, below field 50. OK, for the interest of the whole matter, the king would end up, paying something close to 18.5 quintillion grains. That is, 18.5 billion billions! No wonder he couldn't bring out that much, let alone do the math that high, without modern-day technology. - And, agreed, few of us, will ever have to deal with that high numbers, in our monthly budgetting. Smile. So, I do accept any objections, that this was an overkill stress-test on the synths. Yet, I found it interesting to let you all know of the results, since it does tell a bit about how differently made a synth can be. A synth that does not handle numbers anything higher than field 7 in the chart below - which in daily life would mean anything higher than one-hundred-thousands, we might conclude that the manufacturer has not bothered to do too much work on. The CereVoice Kathrine, does have a nice human touch to it, but it holds several errors in pronunciation - and like this test showed, even cannot handle numbers in full, once they exceed 100 thousand. Still, it is not among the cheapest on the market. The SAPI and NeoSpeech voices here tested, did perform well all through the fifty first fields, which by far will exceed the normal wages of any emplyee. :) They are not too expensive, have a varying grade of human touch to their voices (all depending on taste and actual voice), and are fairly priced. But even with the specially dedicated Eloquence voices in Window-Eyes, which are quite well performing in human sounding (at least to some degree), the test showed differences of quite a stretch. The US voices, dealt with numbers even through field 60, whilst the German voice, had no chance from field 41 and onward. Well enough, numbers are not that big a deal, and this stress-test might seem silly to most users. But it does show some of the differences, and maybe gives some fun for any of you, who choose to fool with the below cited chart. Enjoy! Field Number Amount Of Grains 1 1 2 2 3 4 4 8 5 16 6 32 7 64 8 128 9 256 10 512 11 1024 12 2048 13 4096 14 8192 15 16384 16 32768 17 65536 18 131072 19 262144 20 524288 21 1048576 22 2097152 23 4194304 24 8388608 25 16777216 26 33554432 27 67108864 28 134217728 29 268435456 30 536870912 31 1073741824 32 2147483648 33 4294967296 34 8589934592 35 17179869184 36 34359738368 37 68719476736 38 137438953472 39 274877906944 40 549755813888 41 1099511627776 42 2199023255552 43 4398046511104 44 8796093022208 45 17592186044416 46 35184372088832 47 70368744177664 48 140737488355328 49 281474976710656 50 562949953421312 51 1125899906842620 52 2251799813685250 53 4503599627370500 54 9007199254740990 55 18014398509482000 56 36028797018964000 57 72057594037927900 58 144115188075856000 59 288230376151712000 60 576460752303423000 61 1152921504606850000 62 2305843009213690000 63 4611686018427390000 64 9223372036854780000 Grand total 18446744073709600000 If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. 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