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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. :)"
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
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.
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.
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
But is it smart enough to pronounce the boldfaced word above as "phonemes"?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
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!)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
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.
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
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#nohup cat