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DECtalk Archive

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Re: DECtalk Archive

#11

Post by neilv »

For a school assignment, we had to find a dusty old computer, to run dusty old software DECtalk, to better understand speech.

The assignment was to annotate lines from some famous sayings and speeches, to make the DECtalk output much better than the default.

My lab partner and I might've spent an hour alone on the Gettysburg Address fragment, "...and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" be delivered like an impassioned speech.

(That line was the most memorable, since there was so much to work with, and you could make it dramatic.)

Re: DECtalk Archive

#14

Post by toast0 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #9
DonHopkins wrote: post #4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31427032 DonHopkins on May 18, 2022 | root | parent | next [–] Here's a historic DECTalk Duet song from Peter Langston (which is actually quite lovely): Eedie & Eddie (And The Reggaebots) - Some Velvet Morning (Peter Langston) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0Ko1GUiSo Peter S. Langston - "Some Velvet Morning" (By Lee Hazelwood) - Performed By Eedie & Eddie And The Reggaebots htt…

> The most satisfying way I ever made a free phone call I remember as a kid me and my buddies making a free call from one phone booth to another (across the road - not terribly useful) just by asking to reverse the charges. The phone company evidentially never realized that the target number was a phone booth, so it worked as normal by the recipient just agreeing to pay (without actually having to do so by putting an…

If that was a customer owned coin operated telephone (COCOT), the phone company may not have known it was a pay phone, and the customer may not have known they could instruct the phone company to prevent accepting collect calls.

Re: DECtalk Archive

#16

Post by rootbear »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #13

Is this what Stephen Hawking used at the time?

It is frequently stated that Hawking used a DECTalk system, but in fact he did not. He used a Speech Plus CallText 5010. They sound similar because DECTalk and CallText were both based on the MITalk work of Dennis Klatt. The full story can be found here:

  https://computerhistory.org/blog/how-dectalk-gave-voice-to-a-genius-engineering-stephen-hawkings-wheelchair/

Re: DECtalk Archive

#17

Post by dosman33 »

Man, this brings back memories of playing with Festival back in the day. I wrote a bunch of scripts to generate dynamic Festival text2speech audio for a Part15 AM radio station, a virtual radio station DJ over 15 years ago. The intelligibility was not great back then, the funny thing was after spending many hours listening and tweaking my input text I trained myself to understand the default voice a lot better. Other people had a hard time with the default voice but I could understand it perfectly. Thankfully some of the improved voices available back then helped it a lot.

To fix pronunciation problems I had developed a set of domain-specific "dictionaries", sed substitution scripts that would translate certain words and phrases into their phonetic versions that would be pronounced better by Festival. Besides announcing the names of songs being played, I was also feeding news articles and some other web-scraped info through it. Tons of fun to hear your project working on the air in public as you drive around town.

Re: DECtalk Archive

#18

Post by bregma »

> Perfect Paul would end up being a model emulating how Klatt talked in his younger days.

Anyone who started life as a drunken Swedish sailor then went on to invent something like DECTalk has done well.

I worked on a shipping product that used DECTalk back in the 1980s and I can still hear that voice. There were certain words we could just never get it to say correctly, even when spelled out using the special DECTalk phonetic codes. The one I remember strongest was a customer name ("Guelph" properly pronounced "gwelf" but the closest DECTalk could get was something like "welp"). Given that it's been almost 40 years and it's still burned into my brain, I may have DECTalk trauma.

Re: DECtalk Archive

#19

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

toast0 wrote: post #14
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most satisfying way I ever made a free phone call I remember as a kid me and my buddies making a free call from one phone booth to another (across the road - not terribly useful) just by asking to reverse the charges. The phone company evidentially never realized that the target number was a phone booth, so it worked as normal by the recipient just agreeing to pay (without actually having to do so by putting an…

If that was a customer owned coin operated telephone (COCOT), the phone company may not have known it was a pay phone, and the customer may not have known they could instruct the phone company to prevent accepting collect calls.

This was just an outdoor UK red phone booth (back in mid 70's), presumably owned by BT. I guess back then the operator may not have even had a computer to refer to, so not much they could do.

Re: DECtalk Archive

#20

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

bregma wrote: post #18

> Perfect Paul would end up being a model emulating how Klatt talked in his younger days. Anyone who started life as a drunken Swedish sailor then went on to invent something like DECTalk has done well. I worked on a shipping product that used DECTalk back in the 1980s and I can still hear that voice. There were certain words we could just never get it to say correctly, even when spelled out using the special DECTalk…

Could perhaps(?) do better with phonemes, but "gwehllf" seems kinda ok.

https://webspeak.terminal.ink/

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