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

wouldn't it be easier....

[CodePoet82]

as the writeup said, this could be used in a cellphone to read what you were looking at, but wouldn't it be simpler, and backwards compatible, to just do text to speach synthisis on a remote computer. every cell phone out there can already just transmit the sound from a remote location, and it wouldn't require any new/expensive chips.

Re:Nothing new

[morcheeba]

No, those chips (it was a pair) were power-hungry 5 volt parts made by General Instrument. One was a microcontroller (8051?) with the text-to-phonome algorithm, and the other was the phonome-to-audio processor (GI SP0256). Actually, the SP0256 could accept external roms for specialized words, so it could have spoken in any language you wanted.

Check out quadravox for boards that emulate the SP0256, using ISD's analog flash memory and a microcontroller.

(My misadventure with the old GI chip: -12 instead of +5, just for a split second. After that, it developed an stutter!)

Re:Dr. Sbaitso

[generic-man]

All you had to do was ask. Sound Blaster Acting Intelligent Text-to-Speech Operator.

Re:Mac OS has that

[cduffy]

Actually, on a more serious note, is there anyone working on an open source speech synthesis project?

Yup; it's called Festival.

Re:Why dump more tech than necessary into the phon

[Kraft]

Wow! Your Oracle admin is blind? *im baffled*

I have never worked with blind people, but after reading an article last year about how websites are getting more and more difficult for braille browsers (flash, imagelinks without alt tags etc.), I decided to make a lynx-friendly version of my site - and so should YOU!

Anyways, how does he do it?? Is it worth it to the company you work for, or does it cause everyone else problems? Is he good? Tell! Hopefuly this could encourage others to take on "disabled" in their company....