ancient speech synthesizers

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

Hi Kirk,

Those were the days, weren't they? That fist system of mine was by 
Digital Group out of Denver, with an S-100 bus, and it was the system 
used for the column in Byte magazine called "Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar." 
But Digital Group went belly up, and Byte magazine would not allow any 
references to the system after that.

Story of my life! I wasn't wealthy, I just got screwed a lot.

My first speech software was table driven, not text-to-speech. I had a 
table of the 256 Ascii characters, with a phoneme string giving the name 
of each character. The plan was to just put the thing on line and let it 
spell stuff for me. But when I connected to the campus computer for the 
first time, it sent me so many rubout characters as part of the login 
sequence, and it took my stupid terminal so long to say "rubout" a 
million times, that I had timed out before I could log in. That taught 
me the importance of killing speech and reviewing the screen.

Later I expanded the table to include multi character strings and the 
phonemes necessary to pronounce those strings, so it became a mix of 
spelling and whole word output. Pronunciation was perfect, but lots of 
stuff had to be spelled. I kept enhancing the table to cut down on the 
spelling, but it was a futile chase.

Curious, when I showed the system to people, they would type a test 
phrase to see if my computer "knew" the words. And their phrases always 
contained the words fuck and shit. So I had to put fuck and shit into 
my pronunciation table. But what I did was associate a different phoneme 
string for those words, so when someone typed "go fuck yourself" my 
computer said impressively, "go intercourse yourself",. and similarly, 
"you are full of excrement" instead of what was actually typed.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys. But then the TTS algorithms came 
along and I was left in the dust yet again.

Chuck

-- 
The Moon is Waning Gibbous (85% of Full)
Only 10 kinds of people: those who do binary, and those who do not.
But you can get a few downloads from http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh