text to speech pronunciation

[Timothy Miller]

Hi,

This is actually a question about DreamCard for OS 9... I asked about 
this on the HC list too. Sorry about the duplication.

I'm revising an old HC stack I wrote for my wife to help her 
elementary school students practice phonics. She has an elderly 
macintosh in her classroom, which could be dedicated to this use, so 
HC is perfect, really.  The stack presents nonsense syllables, 
mostly. It shuffles different word beginnings to the same word 
endings, vice versa, etc.

Maybe I can upgrade the ancient machine to the point that a DreamCard 
standalone would run on it.

I'm trying to use the saytext external for HC to get the computer to 
pronounce the nonsense syllables. It's pretty good most of the time, 
but some nonsense syllables get mispronounced. For example, "wap" 
gets mispronounced as "wop" (No slurs against Italians intended.)

I've tried modifying the text that gets passed to sayText, with 
little luck. According to Apple, macinTalk pronunciation can be 
altered by a long list of modifiers.

The commas here do produce pauses.
	wap, woop,, wap,,, whap,,, wopper

This works
	chocolate cake

The de-emphasis code here works:
	chocolate [[emph - ]] cake

None of the following work, though. The symbols either get ignored or 
pronounced literally.

I like % choc=o=late @ cake
I like chocolate [[/ ]] cake
I like chocolate [[/]] cake
I like chocolate / cake
Hello, I am [[inpt PHON]]mAYkAXl[[inpt TEXT]], the talking
computer.

As far as I can tell, I reached the limits of what the sayText 
external can do. Apparently, it only passess a small subset of all 
possible pronunciation modifiers to macinTalk.

How about DreamCard. I assume it has some text to speech ability. 
(true?) Does it allow more pronunciation modifiers than HyperCard?

Thanks,


Tim