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. :)"

Comments

Re:Mac OS has that

[SnapShot]

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...

Commodore C64: SAM

[twms2h]

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? ;-)

Technology advances...

[Znork]

...and everything gets slower. I read between 2-20 times faster than I can comprehend spoken language, depending on the junkfiltering that's possible.

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 .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.

At least until the phone can give me an (intelligent) summary when I say 'Get to the point'.

Re:Dr. Sbaitso

[EvlPenguin]

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