State of Speech Synthesis and Text-To-Speech?

Gnulix asks: "Are there any, preferably either open source products available that produce realistic speech from an arbitrary (English) text? Projects such as Festival doesn't sound all that much better than SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) did on a Commodore 64 back in 1979, nor does SoftVoice's or IBM's new products sound very good. I mean we all know that Stephen Hawking is a fun loving guy, but I bet you that he didn't choose his unrealistic, robotic voice just for the heck of it. With all the amazing advances we have seen in real-time graphics, shouldn't speech synthesis have come much, much further than what is, seemingly, available today?" Ask Slashdot last handled the Voice-To-Text issue in January of this year.

Comments

He calls himself "The Hawk"

[QuietRiot]

Lyrics to "All My Shootin's Be Drivebys"

Trash Talk
Ah yeah, that's right motherfuckers!
I'm back riding a funky track.
I got a story to tell you all,
So listen up!
Yo! Trip on this!

Verse 1
I'm rolling through the hood on a Saturday night,
got a 40 in my left hand, my dick in my right,
some chronic in my lap, a pager in my cap,
and a 9 millimeter in the small of my back.
I'm just chilling no place to be,
I take another pull off my 40 z.
I'm thinking 'bout spinning a fat ass tree,
a B to the L to the U-N-T.

Then I get a call on my dope cell phone,
check the caller ID, what up homes?
Yo, it's the Doom and his news ain't good:
"little Pookie got capped last night in the hood."
I feel like the world is fading away,
I saw Little Pookie just the other day.
Pookie was my boy we shared Kool-aid in the park,
now some punks took his life in the dark.

I ask Doomsday who the motherfuckers be,
"some punk ass bitches from MIT."
The fucking Institute, man I should've known,
I say meet me at my crib and hang up the phone.
Playtimes over I got a job to do,
and the world will be less crowded by the time I'm through,
and I'll keep rolling while bullets fly,
cause all my shootings be drivebys.

Verse 2
One minute to midnight we hit the street,
cold as a cadaver, hard as concrete.
Doomsday's packing a baby Mac,
got my AK-47 and the nine in my back.
The Alpine's glowing, P-E's flowing,
got my swerve on tight and my game face showing.
Them damn punks are gonna pay,
the Hawks on the case a bird of prey.

Then up ahead cold chilling in the street,
six motherfuckers from MIT.
I flick off the safety, check my grip,
and load a dum-dum clip.
I glance at the Doom to make sure he's packed,
his fingers on the trigger of his baby Mac.
Time to give a Newtonian demonstration,
of a bullet its mass and its acceleration.

Nine on my lap AK in my hand,
I roll up slow like a snake in the sand.
I wait till I'm sure they can see my face,
then I bust out slugs to the beat of the bass.
The streets sketched out in the full moon light,
MIT punks dying left and right.
There's nowhere to run don't even try,
cause all my shootings be drivebys.

...

Re:is linux insecure?

[Cecil]

Yes, IHBT. But I just found it amusing how quickly the fatal flaw of this argument popped up.

It stands to reason that the core Linux(TM) kernel, the version distributed by Linus at http://www.kernel.org, cannot meet these minimum requirements, because if it did, all versions of Linux(TM) would meet these minimum requirements. After all, other Linux distributions are not going to be made less secure. (emphasis mine)

Oh, really now? So you mean, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make a distribution that included "rootkitd" that listens on a port for a script kiddie to upload his rootkit to? Or would you suggest that this would not invalidate CC EAL4?

In either case, it's a pretty laughable little paragraph that destroys the rest of this troll. Oh well, better luck next time!