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Text-to-Speech on a Low-Power Chip

Posted by michael on from the youve-got-voicemail dept.

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. :)"

9 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Why dump more tech than necessary into the phone? by StaticEngine · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Sure, the tech is cheap and relatively disposable, but is moving every feature but the kitchen sink into the cellphone really the way to do it? The phone can already send and transmit voice, so why not keep the text-to-speech synthesis at some central server where the systems can be maintained and upgraded, rather than having to support/manufacture/refurbish thousands of phones out in the field?

    The cellphone may have all the power of an original Palm Pilot these days, but we don't need to make it into a Onyx Server.

  2. I bet it will choke... by MarkusQ · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I bet it will choke on:

    The lead story read: "Unionized environmental health workers object to new chip that can read un-ionized lead levels."

    Reading english is a lot tougher than most English speaking people think.

    -- MarkusQ

    1. Re:I bet it will choke... by jiheison · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I would assume that it could recognize and handle a dash appropriately.

      You're right though: rough, bough, cough, laughter, slaughter etc. might give it trouble (they certainly gave Ricky Ricardo a headache).

      It would have to do a lot more than simply translate the text to phonemes to be effective with English.

  3. Good for the Blind. by jellomizer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Any technology that can translate text to words is a good thing so the Blind people can have less of a hard time with technology which is mostly sight driven. But of course with my Really bad spelling it could drive people nuts. (Yea Yea Lern to spell and that will fix the problem) But I always want the feature to disable it no matter how low processing power it uses. Speaking is generally slower then reading. Plus there is some times were your concentration dosent need a computer speaking to you.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  4. Re:Mac OS has that by SnapShot · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    --
    Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
  5. Phenomes? by Sodium+Attack · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    But is it smart enough to pronounce the boldfaced word above as "phonemes"?

    --

    Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.

  6. Mandarin (not the orange) by gbrandt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the you feel that you have to state 'not the orange' when using the word Mandarin in a language context, perhaps you should also state 'not the peoples of the England' when using the word English in the same context.

  7. Re:Why dump more tech than necessary into the phon by DdJ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sure, the tech is cheap and relatively disposable, but is moving every feature but the kitchen sink into the cellphone really the way to do it?

    I've got a co-worker, our Oracle admin, who's blind. As things stand, with most cell phones he can't do anything except dial out and answer calls. He can't use the built-in address book to place calls for example, because all of the info is in text on a tiny screen. With text-to-speech software on the phone, he'd be able to use the address book just like sighted folks, read text messages he received earlier even when he's in an area with no coverage just like sighted folks, and so on. This is a good idea.
  8. Re:Why dump more tech than necessary into the phon by tych0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You have to remember that economics is what drives these things. If there are yuppies or geeks out there who want to have "every feature but the kitchen sink" in their cellphone, PDA, or whatever, there will be a company out there that will be happy to take their money to implement these technologies.