On Monday 30 July 2007 15:07, Tim wrote: > Rudolf Kastl: > >>> personally i found that http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ is already > >>> much more versatile. > > Tim: > >> Hmm, neither this, nor Festival, sound as good as the speak device on > >> the Amiga (from the mid 1980s). That's a bit surprising, I'd have > >> thought that it'd be vastly outperformed, by now. > > Ed Greshko: > > Is this observation from memory or do you have an Amiga running today and > > are making an actual comparison? Just wondering. > > The Amiga's speech sounds quite like Steven Hawking's speech synth, not > to mention a few other speech synths used by the disabled. That'll give > a few more people an idea what it sounds like, seeing as it pops up in > movies and television. I couldn't easily drag mine out and sample it, > for quite some time, it's buried amongst the rest of my clutter. I still have a working Amiga on my desk. If enough people are interested, I just might be able to record a couple of sentences (though it would require some cablework). What is the easiest way to record sound in Fedora (with the Sound Blaster Live card)? > While it doesn't sound very polished, it is quite understandable, and > handled most words and sentences fairly appropriately (changing pitch, > and pausing, where it should, etc.). Yup, in those days I was amazed that in piched up on a comma and down on a period. A machine with 512 KB memory, booted from a floppy disk... I've never heard of any PC talking so good. Otoh, I have yet to hear the Festival... :-) Best, :-) Marko Marko Vojinovic Institute of Physics University of Belgrade ====================== e-mail: vmarko@xxxxxxxxxxxx
