What’s the deal here? Surely synthesizers these days can come up with something a little more human sounding. Or is it just very old hardware which hasn’t been updated?
I believe he likes it, having gotten used to it for so long it’s like his own voice and is reluctant to change it. I thought I read this on his wiki page, but can’t see it the noo. Anyway, this is the explanation that I have heard.
What I’ve read is that he’s unhappy that his voice has an American accent. Apparently there aren’t any with English accents, at least not that are up to snuff.
80’s vintage voice synthesizers were doing well to produce intelligible speech at all, much less proper accenting.
Some of the voices on a Mac have British Accents…
My GPS can speak English in American, British, Australian accents, plus about a dozen or so different languages. They are very understandable.
Your GPS isn’t from the 80’s.
It’s not like British accents are intrinsically more complex to synthesize than American accents or anything, of course. But I guess all the initial work on such things was being done by Americans, and thus what was first available was stuff with American accents.
I don’t know what GPS you have, but the ones I’ve seen all have recorded clips played in different combinations. It’s not voice synthesis.
It’s much easier as they have a lot less things they might need to say.
Some of the newer ones use voice synthesizers (they’re a lot better than in the old Macintalk days). They are spiffy because they (try to) pronounce every road name and destination, which would be infeasible for pre-recorded systems.
The one I use, the nüvi, has voice synthesis and sounds very natural indeed.
Oh. Nevermind then.
I guess Stephen Hawking doesn’t want to change his voice now. As clearly he could.
Charles (UK) is awesome. I’m having him read my category theory textbooks, line by line.
Damn! Time limit… oh, how can I slog through these papers now? The grandeur is lost; I can’t bear to go back to that drab, dull world of before.
Oh, shoulda warned you. Same thing happened to me. I also tried it in Polish, and wow. Sounds great.
Going here, clicking “Let’s start” and then going to TTS under button 4 seems to get around the time limit, at least so far.
I’m not getting any work done today…
Here’s some interesting info about Stephen Hawking’s machine:
Oram, Andy, and Greg Wilson, eds. Beautiful Code. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2007. 483-484.
(Emphasis mine)
The chapter, entitled “When a Button Is All That Connects You to the World” was written by Arun Mehta, a co-founder of Radiophony, a company that is working on an open-source product called eLocutor(Warning: PowerPoint), in hopes of replacing the aging setup that Professor Hawking uses.
Here’s the Radiophony page on The Hawking Project
Here’s Professor Stephen Hawking’s description of his experience with ALS
One thing that has hampered the text to speech readers, is the copyright arguing going on. Often books were published and then a different company bought rights to sell it on cassette. The audio books sellers didn’t like that people used a reader on the text file books. All sorts of restrictions and stuff during this long fight put off many developers. I think we could have been further along than we are in this field.
I have a British male and female voice that I use occasionally for text to speech books.
The voices appear to be from AT&T Labs TTS, which is one of the best (or at least the most “human-sounding”) TTS I’ve heard.