[DECtalk] A history question

[ebruckert Bruckert]

He recorde alot before his voice went. By 1982 it was very different. And I
don't have a lot of backups as the medu=iums changed.

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Brandon Misch <bmisch2002 at gmail.com>wrote:

> his voice didn't sound that bad from that record about speech systems from
> the 30's to the 80's unless that wasn't him.
>
>  On Jan 30, 2011, at 9:56 AM, ebruckert Bruckert wrote:
>
> All the DECtalk voices have been there since 1982. In fact the Dennis voice
> was modeled by Dennis Klatt at the time to be his closest match to his own
> voice as he could. When I first met him his natural voice was already
> deteriorating due to his throat cancer.
>
> The DTC 01 does try to hear touchstones while at speaking it tries to
> cancel out the outgoing sound from the ingoing sound and in old systems used
> to work pretty good. Whether changes in telephony have made that more
> difficult I don't know.
>
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Jayson Smith <ratguy at insightbb.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Okay, this is getting way out there, but when did DECtalk get the eighth
>> and
>> ninth voices? I remember hearing a sample of DECtalk in I think it was
>> Dialogue Magazine on flexible disk. My parents had a copy. I heard the
>> piece
>> in 1989, not sure when it was actually done though. At that point, DECtalk
>> only had seven voices, from how I understand it. Dennis and Wendy weren't
>> present.
>> Then in November of 1989 we got our Kurzweil Personal Reader with DECtalk
>> in
>> it. All nine voices were there, in pretty much the same form they kept
>> until
>> Digital became Compaq and Force got hold of DECtalk. I think the version
>> on
>> the Kurzweil was something older than 4.0. While the voices sounded a lot
>> alike, there were some pronunciation differences.
>>
>> We got our first DECtalk PC running version 4.0 in mid 1993, and our first
>> DECtalk Express in mid 1995.
>>
>> Over all, I'd have to say my favorite DECtalk version is 4.2CD, the
>> version
>> that's running on all our DECtalk Expresses. 4.3 is excellent too, and
>> it's
>> all over the place in the DECtalk Archive, thanks to the speak43 program
>> making the rounds. From what I heard of 4.4 in the demo sent to this list
>> yesterday, it sounds pretty good. I'm not exactly sure what version of
>> DECtalk Access32 uses, but by then there were a few changes. We got our
>> copy
>> of Access32 in mid 1998. In particular, the B sound, as in the words bin,
>> bye, and bag, almost had an extra sound like it was trying to put an r in
>> there. Not quite sure how to describe it.
>>
>> I think my least favorite version is 4.61. Don't know if I ever heard
>> 4.63.
>> I think 4.64 sounds kind of weird, a bit sluggish or something. From what
>> I
>> heard of it, I think DECtalk 5 sounded better than 4.64, though not as
>> good
>> as the Digital versions.
>>
>> On a somewhat related note, a few years ago I purchased a DTC01 on eBay.
>> It's running DECtalk 2.0 from July 1984, and you can tell it. Not sure how
>> many voices it has. It's pretty much just been sitting around collecting
>> dust, unfortunately. I thought I might use some of its telephone
>> functionality, but the DTC01 had some limitations I didn't know about
>> until
>> I already had it, E.G. can't detect touchtones while speaking, can't
>> automatically detect hangups, etc. So that never happened.
>> Jayson
>>
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>
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