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Bell Labs, Preserving Delicate Sensibilities
LuserOnFire writes: "There is a PigDog article talking about the Bell Labs Text-to-Speech Synthesis. The amazing thing is not the technology itself, but that fact that Bell-Labs has a checkbox next to it that says 'If you plan to enter text which our system might consider to be obscene, check here to certify that you are old enough to hear the resulting output.'?!?! Like if you are old enough to spell a swear, you don't know what the word sounds like?" More fun than a TI-99/4A with speech-synthesis card. Those wouldn't say the bad words at all.
Quick! Someone pipe the DeCSS source through there so the RIAA can go after Bell Labs!
grubTrolling is a art,
This stuff sounds only marginally better than speech card add-on a college friend had for his TRS-80 and that was in 1982.
:-P
It, too, filtered profanities, but foh-net-ik spelling solved that problem.
That's bugged me for years. In Kubrick's 2001, they could talk to HAL and HAL would respond in a pleasant human sounding voice. Okay, it didn't do a great job singing, but not only do we in the real 2001 not have a computer you can converse with (Eliza notwithstanding), but we can't even do the speech! Of course, Clarke never envisioned marvels like http://www.amiallyourbaseornot.com, so I guess we have other advantages in the real world vs. science fiction.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Made the rounds a decade ago, from a radio 4 interview honoring 40 years since the battle of britian. Many modified versions of this story have circled the internet in humour files and joke lists.
I've heard the original audio on a BBC request show. Quite hilarious when you hear the whole thing. This is the closest I've found in a web search to what I remember the interview was like.
BBC INTERVIEWS AN RAF PILOT...
Gerry Wills, the famous BBC commentator, was interviewing Gerherd "Zibby" Zebdrehah the equally famous Polish WWI fighter ace who flew for the British. The interview went like this...
BBC: So please tell us Captain Zebdrehah about your most intimidating foe from those years.
Zebdrehah: I remember being jumped by 4 or 5 Fokkers. My God, the sky was thick with those Fokkers and every where I turned they were on me instantly...
BBC: I should just inform the radio audience that Captain Zebrehah is talking about the aircraft his opponent usually flew, the "Fokker" fighter plane.
Zebdrehah: Ya, maybe usually but these Fokkers were all flying Messerschmits!
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
In high school, I did some work for a local TV station, and I still remember filming an interview with a "hometown celebrity" who flew in some of the older warplanes.
Fokker (sp?) makes a lot of warplanes. Fokker also sounds a bit, um, obscene when spoken by somebody with a gutteral voice.
"...an' then we hit some ack-ack from the border guards an' that ol' Fokker started twisting so bad..."
Had to do quite a bit of trimming on that interview before running it.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The Festival speech synthesis system page also has a web-based text-to-speech converter here, without the filter. It's free software, and does a pretty good job.
;-)
The automatic voice pitch is pretty neat; I built a hardware text-to-speech converter around 10 years ago, and it only produced a monotone voice that got pretty annoying after a while. Don't feed Festival raw HTML documents, though - it can cause the voice to get deeper and deeper until it has to reset the pitch.
Great, now we slashdotted free speech.
Monkey sense
I AM a mirror running. Mail me your text and I will call you back by phone to read your text aloud.
I can do the male voice, the female voice, in French, Dutch and English.