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Text-to-Speech on a Low-Power Chip
bluephone writes: "The EE Times has a story on a new chip from Winbond that can take ASCII or UNICODE text and convert it to either spoken English or Mandarin (the Chinese language, not the orange). The low-power chip scans the text and translates it into spoken phenomes and outputs it to a filter for smooth analog sound, or can directly output the digital signal. Imagine a cell phone with this, you can have your email read to you, rather than seeing a line at a time on a dinky screen, street directions from a website, or even Slashdot's headlines. :)"
would be something we can all be impressed with.
That's all I need, Stephen Hawking's voice coming at me from my cell phone:
Anonymous cowards love the rich meaty taste of spam.
could i set it to a deep erotic female sounding voice and have it read dirty stories to me?
no
Can you imagine millions of geeks' cell phones with this chip? "First Post" echoing throughout the world...
My Amiga was talking to me 15 years ago.
Actually, my Timex Sinclair 1000 was talking to me 20 years ago, but I think that was the acid...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Phone: "Are you looking for hot [chicks|sex|pussy|love]?"
Wife: "um... what was that, honey?"
Phone: "Get your University diploma!"
Wife: "What, I'm not good enough the way I am?"
Phone: "Get out of debt now!"
Wife: "Okay, you know what? That's your birthday present on the Credit card, bucko. That's it. I'm leaving..."
I am the very model of a modern major general!
Yeah, but you know the power consumption would be a hell of a lot higher on the chip that everybody would really want anyways: the Text-to-Barry-White-Speech chip.
"You've got mail, baby."
yes, but simple text and Chinese ... that's like comparing apples to oranges, no?
Regnant populi. (The people rule.) Pregnant ropuli. (The snake will soon lay eggs.)
No, no, that's "polk flied lice"
~ now you know
Another female voice calling my cell phone and telling my i'm offtopic...
Great achievement, my Commodore C64 could do that so many years ago that I don't even remember when it was. SAM, the speech synthesizer which could even "sing".
;-)
Has anything new happened lately?
...and everything gets slower. I read between 2-20 times faster than I can comprehend spoken language, depending on the junkfiltering that's possible.
.2 cps. I know this is a difficult concept to grasp for certain cell phone companies, but a phone, as opposed to a computer, does not have these things, and thus it _sucks_ for email and browsing, and will continue to do so until it has those things, at which point in time you will not want to carry it around because it aint gonna fit in your pocket anymore.). Nor do I want to listen to my email. I dont have the time or the patience for it.
No way in hell do I want to read email on a cell phone (it's a PHONE. You _talk_ to people in it. If it was a generic mail reader it would have at least a 17 inch monitor and a keyboard that lets you type faster than
At least until the phone can give me an (intelligent) summary when I say 'Get to the point'.
MacIntalk is older than that, and quite franky, it rocks. Man or Astroman (one of the greatest bands ever -- especially live) use it as their lead singer. Fred really can sing.
In other news, "Man or Astroman wants all the party people.. to say.... yeeeaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh"
And by the way, the voice on "Fitter, Happier" (Radiohead) was actually Thom during an especially intense episode of innebriation >:P
--
#nohup cat
Unlike everybody who posted "big deal, my Commodore 64 used to hold long, sexy conversations with my Speak & Spell about the meaning of Wargames," I actually read the article. Near the end it says "The multilevel storage memory system allows the chip to store up to 256 different voltage levels, or the equivalent of 8 bits, into one EEPROM cell, which is up to 8x the capacity of conventional memories..."
Being a software geek with my last classes in EE/CE several years safely my sordid past, I'm out of touch. Is this a big deal?
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.