Slashdot Mirror
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. :)"
I have a little bot written in perl and VXML that reads my email. It is far esier than making the phone do the processing, and ita free. see studio.tellme.com
Cell phones, PDA's, perhaps new tools for people with vision disabilities, where it could pick up plain text via IR near busy intersections or information kiosks. Text is small, broadband wouldnt be required, since its all converted in real time on a chip. Since it is supposed to be low-powered, it would be great for devices that didnt need to be recharged often, like the pagers mentioned in the article.
I wonder how lifelike the voice is though. I don't think any text-speech tools are going to become very mainstream untill they sound better.
Sure, the tech is cheap and relatively disposable, but is moving every feature but the kitchen sink into the phone really the way to do it? Why put a radio transmitter and receiver in the headset-- if you do that, then you'll need a battery to power it. Stay with the corded phones, I say! And, if you have more than one person in a city talking on these newfangled radiophones, you'll need a computer to set the radio frequency! My Gremlin's 8 track player/AM radio doesn't need a computer to change channels -- it's got those big preset buttons to move the dial for me. The cell phone may have all the power of an trs-80 these days, but we don't need to make it into an IBM-PCjr.
p.s. and don't even get me started on digital phones... converting analog to digital to analog baseband to RF, and then back again!
1) My microwave at home displays "ENJOY YOUR MEAL" when it's finished cooking something, I'd sure love it if instead of cheesy LED's I heard a sexy voice saying "come and get it, baby."
2) Text messengers for blind people. You know those little IM devices all the kiddies have? Well just put brail on the keys and have one of these chips installed... there you go.
3) Watches. The next time somebody says "what time is it?" you just press a button and the voice chip in your watch simulating someone who sounds extremely pissed off shouts the time.
Well, that's it for now...
~ now you know
The most important thing about the Internet is "bandwidth". I'm not talking bits on the wire, I'm talking how fast information flows into my brain. Speech is vastly slower than text as a medium for transfering information into my brain. I'm so accustomed to Internet speeds for information, I can no longer watch TV news -- the bandwidth is too slow. I'm glad I don't go to school anymore -- I could barely stand lectures when I was a kid, I would never be able to sit through them as an adult.
Five years ago everyone in Japan walked around with their phone to their ears. These days, everyone in Japan walks around looking at their phone (instant messaging, etc.). I'm not sure if people "get" the bandwidth problem. Sound must be multiplexed into half-bandwidth, serialized communication. By this I mean you can only input or output at the same time, but not both. Also, incoming messages must arrive separately, not in parallel. With audio, I can only talk to one person at a time, with messaging, I can carry on multiple text-based conversations simultaneously. I mean, text-to-voice has long been availabe on PCs, but nobody uses it for ICQ/AIM/YahooIM/MSIM.
As far as I can tell, audio is dead. Maybe somebody will invent some sort of hyperfast language (didn't Heinlein describe something like that in a book?), but I think the next wave is going to be something new that replaces reading text, not something that goes backwards to audio.
He's got a variety of tools at his disposal. Just the other day, he gave a demo of some of them to a bunch of us.
He's got an 8-dot braile terminal that gives him enough characters to do C and Perl programming. He's got a hardware speech synthesizer he cranks up to something like 200+ words per minute. I tried, and could only understand a few phrases when it was cranked up to 95 words per minute.
And when a web site he needs or wants to access is inaccessible, he complains to them, and sometimes things get fixed. He can navigate web sites that use alt tags remarkably well. A good rule of thumb is that if a site makes sense with images turned off (or in lynx), then it'll work for him.
I like to convert text to mp3s for long journeys so I can listen to Dickens on my Rio. Of course, that takes a lot of disk space. I'd much prefer a little handheld device that simply converts the .txt file which is much smaller, to speech.
I'd pay for it, and I bet a bunch of other people would too.
OoO
Please do not publish outside of