[Wikipedia-l] Text to voice programs

[Richard Grevers]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 23:56:38 -0400, Merritt L. Perkins 
<mlperkins3 at 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