I don't know what operating system other people have on their computers. I am using Microsoft XP home edition. It has a text to voice program with a voice called Microsoft Sam that can have the speed and volume adjusted. It is intended to be used to check your work for mistakes after you run a spell check. In this way you can catch mistakes that you have overlooked while reading the text. . The voice on Dragons NaturallySpeaking 7 is Jennifer and the speed, pitch, and volume can be adjusted I have a huge 21 in. monitor and still find text a little hard to read. If a person is totally blind he would not be able to use a computer because he could not tell he is doing. If his eyesight is somewhat impaired it can be a big help. I know the program is on my computer but I don't know how to use it. There must be instructions someplace but I don't know where. Probably most operating systems have such a program and have had for years . If you want a program to read Encyclopedia articles or e-mails you probably already have the program on your computer, just learn how to use it. As far as reading German is concerned it should be much easier than English. Having Encyclopedia articles read by a human voice would make the files so large that it would be impractical. They would be many times the size of the printed text. How many people remember when a monitor screen was divided into to 30 rows and 80 columns of cells and a cell would hold one character. Characters were perhaps 5 wide by 9 high and defined by an ASCII number. Now word processing programs are much more complicated. Merritt L. Perkins
On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 11:56:38PM -0400, Merritt L. Perkins wrote:
Having Encyclopedia articles read by a human voice would make the files so large that it would be impractical. They would be many times the size of the printed text. How many people remember when a monitor screen was divided into to 30 rows and 80 columns of cells and a cell would hold one character. Characters were perhaps 5 wide by 9 high and defined by an ASCII number. Now word processing programs are much more complicated.
And simple Word-Documents exceed 1MB easily. Recording voice with about 64kbit/s sounds good and don't use so much space. For the first time only "finished" articles would be spoken. And if you're realy in need for spoken words, I'm sure you don't care about file-sizes.
We can also use sound editors for extending the spoken articles or edit it.
ciao, tom
On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 23:56:38 -0400, Merritt L. Perkins mlperkins3@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.
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