On Thu, 2 Mar 1995 09:36:17 +0000 (WET), [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Brian said: > > I am looking for a Decent Cheap speach Synth that will talk > > words given an input from a Par. port. Anyone designing one?
Hmmm, an interesting thought. It would probably not be too hard to persuade a Spectrum + uSpeech to do this, although the uSpeech is obviously going to be quite hard to obtain. There was some discussion recently on comp.lang.rexx which seemed to indicate that the SPO256 speech synthesis chip is now no longer commonly available, which is a shame or you might have been able to use that. > Did the Blue Alpha's voice box not have such a facility, or was > the quality too poor? Actually, I don't see why a software > based solution shouldn't be fine - the SAM's sample output > using the volume control of the sound chip isn't bad really. Which is what I thought of next. Obviously a Sam would be more expensive than a Spectrum, but it should be able to output decent speech through the Sam's sound chip in software. It does after all play quite reasonable samples in which the speech can be recognised. I once saw some software for the BBC Micro (called "*SAY") which produced quite decent speech, but I don't know how it worked. The main problem is to sort out the rules which determine how a particular word is pronounced. The uSpeech doesn't solve this problem - you have to spell the word using allophones. I once wrote a Spectrum program to simulate speech by recording the uSpeech talking, playing it into the MIC socket of the speccy, storing it and playing it back in pieces. I had a limited amount of success... (I suppose I should try it out on the xz80 emulator and see whether it sounds any better!). Unfortunately, since my uSpeech no longer works, I would have to use a real voice talking if I were to repeat this experiment... I think producing a standalone box that does it would be rather difficult though, if you wanted one that does not occupy the Sam. > Which brings me to a question: do you think any SAM users would > be interested in a cheap sampler? I don't know how well Blue > Alpha's did, and I don't know whether to bother designing a > proper PCB. I've never seen a Blue Alpha, but at the moment I can sample things on this Sun workstation so I wouldn't need one. imc
