text to speech pronunciation

[Timothy Miller]

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>Try "waap" for "wap".

Thanks a bunch.

Does "waep" produce a hard, short "a", as in "bat"? I think it's 
supposed to, but it doesn't work in OS 9 in simpleText or hyperCard

>
>Rev has a command revSpeak, so the above in Dreamcard would be:
>
>revSpeak "waap"

Cool.

>As for the text you provided, it seems to work (at least under OS 
>X), although I'm not sure what all of it is supposed to do; except 
>that the '%' sign is named - it says "I like percent chocolate..."

 From Apple's docs:

Like all other phonemes, the "silence" phoneme (%) and the "breath 
intake" phoneme (@) can be lengthened or shortened using the > and < 
symbols. 
The prosodic control symbols (/, \, <, and >) can be concatenated to 
provide exaggerated or cumulative effects.


Also...

To indicate that the Speech Manager should revert to textual 
interpretation of a text buffer, embed the [[inpt TEXT]] command. For 
example, passing the string

Hello, I am [[inpt PHON]]mAYkAXl[[inpt TEXT]], the talking
computer.

to SpeakString, SpeakText, or SpeakBuffer would result in the 
generation of the sentence, "Hello, I am Michael, the talking 
computer."

Some, but not all, speech synthesizers allow you to embed a command 
that causes the Speech Manager to interpret a buffer of text as a 
series of allophones.


Also...

&	(ampersand)	Forces no addition of silence between 
phonemes	No additional effect
:	(colon)	End of clause, no change in pitch	Short pause follows
,	(comma)	Continuation rise in pitch	Short pause follows
...	(ellipsis)	End of clause, no change in pitch	Pause follows
!	(exclam)	End-of-sentence sharp fall in pitch	Pause follows
-	(hyphen)	End of clause, no change in pitch	Short 
pause follows
(	(parenleft)	Start reduced pitch range	Short pause precedes


There's more, but you get the idea.

I might have gotten the syntax wrong with the percent sign. Did Rev 
OS X pronounce "My name is Michael, the talking computer," correctly? 
Is it possible the other symbols worked correctly, now that you know 
what they are supposed to do?

The ancient computer in my wife's classroom will handle OS 9, 
maximum, if that. Would someone try the same text with the OS 9 
version of Rev, and Macintalk Pro, please?

Meanwhile, if I'm getting the syntax wrong and there is a way to make 
these pronunciation modifiers to work properly in HC, I'd like to 
know about it.

I don't mean to be lazy. I'll try it myself in my copy of DreamCard, 
but it's still unfamiliar.

Best regards, thanks in advance, etc.,


Tim Miller

>On Jan 10, 2005, at 11:25 AM, Timothy Miller wrote:
>

--snip--

>>  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?