InfiniteMac OSx86 - View Single Post - [OT] Mac Terminal Sing Songs & speaks german

naquaada · 06-28-2008, 01:35 PM

I must say the speech sythesis of the Amiga was great. Think of it, this was already available in 1985! And needed maybe 50K disk space! In comparison to this the Mac doesn't make very big advantages in at least 23 years. A very big advantage way that the Amiga was also able to speak Phonem codes so that you can define very exactly the output of every letter. Female, male, Robot type speech, speed and pitch modifications were also possible.

A major breakthough was the translator.library and translator.device V43 (these both files control the speech synthesis). You can add various profiles, 'languages', which always could sound different. It's also possible to define single words. If you want to speak 'Computer' in a German profile it sounds stupid, but you can define the word that it's spoken like an English word. Even the a detection of numbers was posssible. In German the number 143 would be spoken (translated) hundred-three-and-fourty (100-3 & 40), in English hundred-forty-three (100-40-3). It's possible to detect this with tanslator.libary V43 and so it could generate a correct translation.

Another adavntage of the Amiga was always the perfect integration in the Shell. So you can mount a 'Speak-handler' and get a device called SPEAK: Now you only have to type 'copy document.txt to SPEAK:' and the computer speaks the whole file. A 'say' command could be replaced using 'echo >SPEAK: "Hallo world" ' this way.