On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 23:56:38 -0400, Merritt L. Perkins
<mlperkins3(a)juno.com> gave utterance to the following:
Having Encyclopedia articles read by a human voice
would make the files
so large that it would be impractical.
Not if is done via the standard technique: The data is sent to your
computer as words + markup exactly as per a web page, and a client on your
computer renders it as speech.
Unfortunately, there is currently only one true speech browser (which
parses HTML and aural css*) available - Emacspeak for Linux. The rest are
page readers, which more or less speak the text which is output by an HTML
renderer (usually embedded MSIE). Many are unaware of structural markup,
relying on punctuation, and can run together text which has a strong
visual separation.
*aural css allows control of speech properties.
Note that Opera has announce that it is working with IBM on greater
incorporation of speech technology in web browsing. I think its mainly the
sort of stuff where you can interact with a computer via speech on a
cellphone - say when ordering a pizza. The "form" has speech prompts and
your answers are processed via speech recognition.
--
Richard Grevers
Between two evils always pick the one you haven't tried