Well, Rod, if you have never heard about any synths not supporting pitch
changing, then your dreamy days are long gone. As a matter of fact,
there is a load of synths on the market, who do not support any
pitching. The whole series of Scansoft voices, and some of the SAPI
voices from other manufacturers. Think, but cannot confirm it on this
computer, that I had trouble with the SAPI voices Mike and Mary from
Microsoft.
The pitch support has nothing to do with the sound card itself. You try
the same voice on as many sound cards you want, if the synth
manufacturer did not prepare his voice for pitching, it simply cannot be
pitched. Not with WE, nor with NVDA, Jaws or any other software. The
pitching has to be hard coded into the very core of the voice itself.
What's more, if you try to set a pitch value on a voice that does not
support pitching, and your script does not make particular error
checking on the operation, your app will crash. Since I have not yet
tried your app, I do not know whether this is the risk with your code.
But if you haven't done so yet, you are encouraged very strongly to make
special error handling on the part that attempts to adjust the pitch of
the synth.
Even the RealSpeak voice that came with my Window-Eyes, does not support
pitch. So like I said, your dreamy days would not keep long.
Yes, Eloquence, ESpeak and Dectalk all supports pitching. If my memory
serves me right, I seem to remember that the Vocalizer voices had some
limitations, whilst the Vocalizer Express series had pitch support. But
I am not privileged to use the Vocalizer series, so cannot convirm that
very statement - it was taken from memory of some postings I saw back in
time on the list.
In addition, some voices does have a rather wierd kind of support.
Theire pitch varies so much, that they get bothersome in listening to,
even with slight adjustment of the pitch.
It all amounts up to the reason, why many users may find a beeping sound
for the Caps more helpful. Or, some screen readers offer you the chance
to have the word "cap" or equivalents, spoken in front of the
capitalized character. If all voices had supported the pitch setting,
there hardly would have been any usage for such alternatives. But like
already stated, the world of speech synths, is flooded with voices with
no pitch adjustment at all.
David
On 3/26/2015 11:47 AM, Rod Hutton via Talk wrote:
Hi Rick, and this is for everyone too trying out CapEnhance,
A couple of things in your note I'd like to respond to.
First, I'm not sure if I've ever heard of a synthesizer which did not
support pitch changes.
If this were so, then, for the synthesizer in question, it would be
impossible to change pitch on the fly using the speech parameters hotkeys.
Does this actually ever happen, namely, that you cannot change pitch use
thing those hotkeys?
CapEnhance uses exactly the same method of changing pitch as the user does
using hotkeys.
Second, in my latest version of CapEnhance, I inserted a routine which
temporarily disables both the screen and keyboard capitalization before
speaking a cap and then resets them to their previous states.
This was to address the problem you had with my earlier version of the app
which produced choppy speech even with Eloquence.
Of course, I'm no wizard, and who can know what effect the app will have
with all of the various synthesizers, not to mention audio devices and their
accompanying software.
One thing I could do is produce a version of the app which allows for tone
changes for caps along with pitch.
Again, only real-world testing would prove its effectiveness.
This app was my attempt to help you out in your difficulties, and, while I'm
glad it works for you with Eloquence, I had serious doubts whether it would
help everybody with all synthesizers. Smile
Indeed, I have noticed a little delay when moving over caps using the
Microsoft Speech Platform synthesizer.
Ah, but this is how we learn and progress, isn't it? smile
Thanks to you and everyone for the feedback, and please keep it coming.
Best regards,
Rod
-----Original Message-----
From: Talk
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Rick Thomas via Talk
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2015 4:51 AM
To: 'Don H'; 'Window-Eyes Discussion List'
Subject: RE: Cap enhanced app
Hi:
I peeked at the code and it looks like he sends the request to however WE
Handles the request and then WE forwards the request to the synth, think
that is what is going on.
You can google to see if your synth allows for pitch changes and if it does
Contac t AI Squared since I don't know if there is a way of working directly
with the synth via a script without getting pretty deep.
It works well with my Eloquence synth but I don't think I remember it
working with the Microsoft synth and I think I remember the Microsoft synth
supporting pitch changes but since I am so weak in this arena will just
mention that googling or contacting a synth manufacturer is a good jump off
point to find out what is possible.
It is really nice to have my caps spoken in a higher pitch again and should
be a basic feature of any screen reader - and usually is.
PS: I had to turn off the speaking of caps in a higher pitch in the WE
Control Panel for the Screen since it was really slowing down speech but the
CapEnhance does not have this problem at all.
Rick USA
-----Original Message-----
From: Talk [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Don H via Talk
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2015 5:27 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Cap enhanced app
Is the Cap Enhanced app supposed to raise the pitch on caps when using
either the vocalizer or vocalizer Expressive speech syns? On my system
it does not.
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