Hehehe, that's pretty good stuff ! I love the Japanese in to English. For the past moth I've been telling my wife that the British actor Jude Law is not pronounced Judoroaw. Now with this software I can show her the Japanese sound to the real English one :-D About time I had something to back up my claims. Yakumo
Also OS X has a command called "say" that will read out whatever you tell it to at the command line, and can also read text files to you. Making it read Java code is pretty funny.
My BBC Micro had the coolest voice thingy. Though you had to type words in really weird ways to make it actually sound like those words. I miss it so...
AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I made them say "All your base are belong to us: you have no chance to escape make your time. ha ha ha!" So AWESOME!!!
also, there's something of a text-to-speech system in Half-Life: the distorted mumble that you sometimes hear in the (military) sections of Black Mesa can be controlled from the console (press ~), type <speak [something]> It works by playing samples, not true speach synthesis, but it can say stuff like "your ass is surrounded by the military" :smt043
Was that the one with the BBC newsreader Kenneth Kendall pre-recorded on ROM? Always wanted a go on one of those. I've heard there were others (Watford Speech Synthesiser) which were more flexible, too, but I haven't managed to find out much.
Alchy: what about the "speak and spell" was it ever "speaking ?" because then it is funny the first Depeche Mode album is named after that computer
Yeah, I got that about the week ago. It's okay, but annoying, and reads everything on the page if you don't select it (and if you select too much, it won't read it at all)
Don't know about that. Speak and spell was a talking educational device I think, not related to the Micro as far as I'm aware. I guess it must "speak", although I have no idea whether it uses combinations of phonetics or just has a bank of complete words in rom which it spits out at you. Phonetics would be a lot more interesting (and flexible, obviously). As for Depeche Mode, I don't know the band really, but given their era I assume they had some synthesised voices in there... would be interesting to find out whether they were generated by a kid's toy ^_^ And since we're talking music: peculiarly, there is an Outkast song which talks about the Speak and Spell and the BBC Micro.
Heck, there is a Goldie Lookin' Chain has a song that mentions the Spectrum, Micro and a whole lot other things... for some retro-inspired action check site
well they made some of the keyboard sounds on moog prodigy but not synthetic voices on that album. i just think it was a funny coincedent
I only had one on a disk - the only extra ROM in my BBC was that word processor thingy - it was an ex-school BBC, still with the county council sticker on the side and the school's name engraved (with a soldering iron) on the top of it. It stopped working though a few years ago, and ended up being thrown out :smt022. And all the emulators suck!
Hmm... there must have been some extra sound hardware, as the BBC's built-in PSG (shared by the SMS and Colecovision, among others... can't remember the name, 76489 maybe?) is only capable of 3 tones + noise, not digitised speech AFAIK.
