Re: [gnuspeech-contact] Early GNUSpeech observations

[Jason White]

David Hill <address@hidden> wrote:

> This sound was put in there deliberately by Steve Nygard to make sure it 
> was clearly understood that the system was not dealing with parts of the 
> input, because (as you guess) the parser (which does all kinds of things 
> including dictionary derivatives, arranging numbers and dates to be 
> spoken in the way people speak them, and so on) is by no means completely 
> ported.  It is probably the very next job because it makes a big 
> different to the overall quality of the spoken output.

Thank you for the explanation, which is much appreciated. Now I understand why
plurals, some past tenses, and certain names are omitted from the
output. I now observe that many of the function declarations in
parser_module.m have been commented out, indicating that porting is still in
progress.

> Also, the dictionary should be expanded -- a project that got put on  
> hold when the NeXT & NeXT software disappeared.  All sorts of proper  
> names/nouns need to be added, including city and country names, people's 
> names, and so on.  It has been more important recently to get the basic 
> software up on GNU/Linux and the Mac.

Indeed so. Bringing the dictionary into accord with the phonetics of the
synthesizer would improve the spoken output markedly, I think, as exemplified
by those pronounced "r" and "l" sounds that need to be addressed.

> Again, the intonation rules, based on the M.A.K. Halliday's intonation 
> scheme for British English, were being refined.  Craig [Taube-] Schock 
> wrote his thesis on the topic under my supervision ("Intonation for 
> Computer Speech Output" -- University of Calgary Dept. of Computer 
> Science 1993) and received the Governor General's Gold Medal for it, but 
> the method had already been greatly improved when we released the new 
> articulatory synthesis software in 1994-5.

In the current, partially ported, version the intonation tends to rise sharply
until punctuation is encountered. I have noticed, however, that the parsing
code inserts markers into the phonetic string which is forwarded to the rest
of the synthesizer for processing, and I surmise that these affect, among
other parameters, the intonation. Thus I will listen again when the parser has
been ported and refined.

With thanks and regards,

Jason.