prog: (what_you_say)
prog ([personal profile] prog) wrote2003-01-29 10:40 am

Uh-lert.

Victoria started talking on someone's Mac and everyone is going bananas. When did I start working with superstitious nomads? Eeee the god-voices talk to us
cnoocy: green a-e ligature (Default)

As opposed to...

[personal profile] cnoocy 2003-01-29 10:30 am (UTC)(link)
My job, where someone started some log on their computer piping through text-to-speech and people got used to it quite quickly. Not that this is necessarily a good thing.

[identity profile] kynn.livejournal.com 2003-01-29 10:42 am (UTC)(link)
*cackle*

Momma mia! It's-a me, Luigi!

[identity profile] cortezopossum.livejournal.com 2003-01-29 03:15 pm (UTC)(link)
I've always liked the Mac's speech synthesizer and tend to keep it so alert messages and AIM messages are spoken. I wish MS Word and my SSH client had built-in speech support but if I can learn enough Applescript, I might be able to write something which can pipe those program's output into the speech synthesizer. Both programs are Applescriptable.

What I really wish someone would do is create more voices. After a while I get tired of Victoria, Agnes and, Bruce. Others I'm not too fond of: Ralph and Fred sound too mechanical -- Junior, Kathy, and Princess are too 'kiddy' -- most of the others aren't very comprehensable. It'd also be nice if there was a way to tune the speech synthesizer to mimic various accents. Ideally my computer (named Luigi) would have an Italian accent. That's probably a bit too much to ask for though.

Momma mia! It's-a me, Luigi!

More Mac and Speech

[identity profile] cortezopossum.livejournal.com 2003-01-29 03:38 pm (UTC)(link)
It's interesting how the Mac's speech synthesizer works really well, even with longer more complex words, yet it screws up some of the simple ones .. like 'job'.

On the other end of things -- I actually tried out the mac's built in speech recognition system. I'd keep it running however it had a bad habit of crashing my Mac so it remains off. When I had it on I found it neccesary to take a few of the commands and put them in a folder I named 'Unmentionables' to disable them... such as: "Put this computer to sleep", and "Quit all applications".

I've been thinking of getting a more professional voice recognition/dictation program. Tie that into a telnet/ssh program running a MUCK session. I've seen a few advertized. I don't know much about them except that for the price I could get other more useful things for my computer.

[identity profile] tahnan.livejournal.com 2003-01-30 01:28 pm (UTC)(link)
It's worth noting that Victoria has recorded a song. Probably more than one, actually, but the one I own is a duet with Leonard Cohen.

[identity profile] prog.livejournal.com 2003-01-31 02:36 pm (UTC)(link)
You can also find Fred doing a spoken-word number on the Radiohead album "OK Computer".