[Wikipedia-l] Text to speech (Was: Conference report from South Africa)

Thu Apr 28 09:36:05 UTC 2005

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At
 http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/speak.html
you can hit a button to have "This is a wiki test" read to you as a WAV.
It is using the service at
 http://www.festvox.org/voicedemos.html
based on the open source Festival speech generation engine.

The HTML is dead simple. The text of a wikipedia page could be generated
on-the-fly within the parser, or from the <body> part of the output.

Or we could have a <speech>special extension</speech> for important
parts. Then again, probably not.

We should, however, ask the people from CMU first before we
wikipedia-flood their demo system :-)

Magnus

Andy Rabagliati schrieb:
> On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Timwi wrote:
> 
> 
>>I guess I shouldn't have said this, because now everyone thinks that 
>>arguing that accents can be mutually unintelligible, is an argument 
>>against natural recordings and for text-to-speech synthesis.
> 
> 
> I am glad you brought it up, as I believe it needs to be addressed.
> 
> When Atlanta Airport (Georgia) opened, with automated trains taking you
> out to the terminals, there was a requirement for public announcements
> telling you which terminal, stand clear, departing now, etc.
> 
> They started out with a pleasant local (Georgian) accent.
> 
> Complaints - sounded too provincial, International passengers, etc.
> 
> They changed it to a female announcer.
> 
> Complaints - people didn't pay enough attention, what was wrong with the
> previous one, etc.
> 
> They have ended up with an assertive, metallic, computer voice.
> 
> No complaints.
> 
> Things pro text to speech :-
> 
> * Immediately works with all Wikipedia content.
> * No problems with editing.
> * Uniformity, even if it is uniformly poor ..
> 
> I will leave the pro natural speech argument to others - after preparing
> my flame-proof underwear :-) I would also welcome input from people for
> whom English is not a first language.
> 
> Cheers,    Andy!
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