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Speech Synthesizer - Full text to speech?


mos6502

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Lee - thanks, I was hoping that was the case!

 

dendawg - What's XB?

 

Also, is there any advantage to having the Speech Editor cart?

 

I am a musician experimenting with old-school voice synthesizers and ran into some pretty serious limitations with the Commodore Magic Voice, so I was hoping for a little more power/ease of use on the TI.

 

-Owen

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The text to speech version for XB works much like the Terminal Emulator II does.

 

Nothing special about the TE 2 cart over XB they just wrote a better program for the TE 2.

 

If you load the same thing in XB no one can tell the difference as Basic is slower then XB also.

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The text to speech version for XB works much like the Terminal Emulator II does.

 

Nothing special about the TE 2 cart over XB they just wrote a better program for the TE 2.

 

If you load the same thing in XB no one can tell the difference as Basic is slower then XB also.

Does the SPGET sub-program return the same phonems as the TE2 uses? That is primarily with what I work, as the phonems provided with TE2 are very easy to work with. When I tried to add speech to my game for XB, I found it very difficult to work with. ISTR that XB works with LPC codes, not phonems like TE2.

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So I can generate individual phonemes with TE2 it appears - can I control other things like speech speed? Any other vocal characteristics I can change?

 

Thanks for all the info so far. Just ordered a speech synthesizer module and TE2 from eBay... this will be my first legit use of the TI-99/4A that I acquired somewhat accidentally from a friend who was moving.

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So I can generate individual phonemes with TE2 it appears - can I control other things like speech speed? Any other vocal characteristics I can change?

Yes. The information is all in the manual. I designed words using phonems for my game. The problem as Rich stated is that BASIC is slow. I had to make a trade-off: slow BASIC and good speech, or fast XB and limited speech. In the end I chose to make the XB version mute. Maybe I need to convert those to LPC to make XB talk my special words, but for me it was too much to bother.

 

Thanks for all the info so far. Just ordered a speech synthesizer module and TE2 from eBay... this will be my first legit use of the TI-99/4A that I acquired somewhat accidentally from a friend who was moving.

Have fun! I would have happily parted with one of my spare TE2s ;)

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Have fun! I would have happily parted with one of my spare TE2s ;)

 

Thanks, if you're offering to send me one, I may still be in the market. The eBayer I was trying to get mine from is being awfully slow about answering my question about local pickup - and technically I haven't bought the cart yet - if they aren't willing to do that, I'd take you up on this.

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Yes. The information is all in the manual. I designed words using phonems for my game. The problem as Rich stated is that BASIC is slow. I had to make a trade-off: slow BASIC and good speech, or fast XB and limited speech. In the end I chose to make the XB version mute. Maybe I need to convert those to LPC to make XB talk my special words, but for me it was too much to bother.

 

 

Have fun! I would have happily parted with one of my spare TE2s ;)

With either cart (i.e. XB or TE2) you have to load Assembly to get any real speed increase out of them.

 

Now if I dumped the EA portion of RXB and shoved in the GPL from TE2 then XB would be the better one of the two. Both speed and the list, but EA is much more popular then Speech.

 

The best solution is dump Basic entirely and put the EA cart and TE2 Speech list in the normal >2000 to >5FFF area of GROM.

 

To bad GRAM is not more popular as that would make the TI killer with everything built into the system. Speech and able to run Assembly without a cart.

Edited by RXB
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Does the SPGET sub-program return the same phonems as the TE2 uses? That's primarily what I work with, as the phonems provided with TE2 are very easy to work with. When I tried to add speech to my game for XB, I found it very difficult to work with. ISTR that XB works with LPC codes, not phonems like TE2.

 

No. SPGET in XB returns the speech strings that are stored in the Speech Synthesizer module for each word. It doesn't have the concept of phenomes. TE2 has a different vocabulary which ARE phenomes, so that it can create any word.

 

In both cases the strings ultimately become LPC strings, as that's all the speech synthesizer can decode. :)

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On a related topic, I am trying to locate to Text-to-Speech disk with the XLAT and SPEAK programs. I have misplaced a bunch of speech utilities because I had lost time to try them out. Of course, now that I want them I cannot find them.

 

Found it. Planet-99 to the rescue!

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Actually tried running the Speech Synthesizer today, and I'm getting an error. According to the manual, I should be typing in the following:

 

OPEN #1:"SPEECH",OUTPUT

 

And going from there. But when I run this line I get an "I/O ERROR". Does this mean my speech module is dead? I've reseated it (and the TE2 cart) several times.

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It could be. Do you have anything else with speech to test it, like Parsec?

 

BTW, I played a little with the text-to-speech kit I mentioned using XB and the SPEAK and XLAT routines. It is pretty neat. Works like the TE2, but it does require memory expansion and disk drives (or a nanoPEB/CF7.)

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Actually tried running the Speech Synthesizer today, and I'm getting an error. According to the manual, I should be typing in the following:

 

OPEN #1:"SPEECH",OUTPUT

 

And going from there. But when I run this line I get an "I/O ERROR". Does this mean my speech module is dead? I've reseated it (and the TE2 cart) several times.

Which I/O error are you getting? The number will say what the computer thinks the problem is. To confirm, you're in TI BASIC with the TE2 cartridge, yes? :) (There's no DSR in the speech synth itself).

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No, but apparently I was. When I tested last night in Win994a I got an I/O error. Tonight I tried again making sure I had CAPS on and I got nothing when printing to SPEECH. I checked the settings and the Speech Synthesizer was not turned on.

 

So my testing results to mos6502 were wrong. :skull:

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