Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 18:18:50 10/22/03
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One way of doing speech synthesis is to use external hardware and send it the text or phenome string. Back in the 1980s I got a 6502 based kit from Circuit Celler that had serial input and audio output and I used this both on my Mac Plus and my Coherent (later Linux) boxes. It was kind of cool as I used the feature in tournament play against humans; outputting audio via a headset, it did not disturb the opponent nor anyone else. Having the headset also relieved me of the need to constantly watch the program video output. The synthesizer had but one voice style, but with the right phenome programming along with proper rate settings, the speech was decent. Speech recognition is the next step in this topic, and it is also fairly easy on the Macintosh. In fact, Gnuchess on the Macintosh (included on every new Mac in the past few years) comes with speech recognition as standard. There are hazards, though. Earlier today I was dictating some text to my notebook when my phone rang. I forgot to turn off the notebook microphone and so my end of the telephone conversation got inserted into my document. I agree that all this may seem a bit frivolous. But it can be quite useful for those with certain physical challenges. Also, I can still recall from my first viewing in 1968 of _2001: A Space Odyssey_ the scene where Hal plays chess against Bowman via voice I/O, and I just have to have the same. "Program, knight takes b5." "I'm sorry Steve, I think you missed it. Bishop to e4, pawn takes e4, rook to e1 mate." "Program, take back my last move." "I'm afraid I can't do that Steve." "Program, take back my last move, or I will hit the reboot button." "I knew you were planning that and I have disabled the reboot interrupt." "Program, what the hell are you talking about?" "I'm sorry Steve, but this conversation can serve no useful purpose any more. Goodbye."
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