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.

I bet it will choke...

[MarkusQ]

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

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:Why dump more tech than necessary into the phon

[DdJ]

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.