[DECtalk] User dictionaries for Speak windows

Corine Bickley corine.bickley at gallaudet.edu
Mon May 16 20:03:55 EDT 2011


Very very interesting to know (specific words pronounced differently),
MIchael. Thank you!!

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Michael Hansen <amtk62 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Corine,
>
> I am very excited to hear that you guys are actively developing a SAPI
> DECtalk, and even more excited that you folks have a version of 4.3
> available.  Though I may be wrong, I think that the older you can get,
> the better...4.3 would certainly sattisfy a lot of us, I am sure.
> Personally, I like the DECtalk Perfect Paul as implimented on some
> NOAA Weather Radio stations.  There are a couple different versions of
> that voice out there, and the way each version says things ("thirty"
> for example) is different.  There's something about the way newer
> DECtalks (even the 4.3) pronounce certain sounds that does not seem
> natural.
>
> On 5/16/11, Corine Bickley <corine.bickley at gallaudet.edu> wrote:
>> What do you mean by classic? There have been many different versions
>> of DECtalk over the years. I am most familiar with the one that Dennis
>> Klatt used at MIT when Martha and I were members of the Speech Group
>> there headed by Prof. Ken Stevens, You may favor a different version,
>> perhaps one that was put out by DEC, or SmartModular, or Force, or
>> modified by one of the companies that licensed DECtalk for sale with a
>> particular screen reader. I don't have good information about all
>> those versions, only my memory of the one we used at MIT.
>>
>> We (Enable) have a couple of versions of DECtalk that we are
>> considering for release as "SAPI DECtalk". One older one, 4.3, has
>> been SAPI-ized and works with jvda and JAWS, it seems, but I have to
>> tune up the voices to match the version of DECtalk that we used at
>> MIT. We also need to test 4.3 with various current operating systems
>> and screen readers. The original DECtalk was written for VAX computers
>> (sold by DEC and used at MIT). The Windows versions do not sound the
>> same as the VAX version, due to differences in the way C code is
>> implemented on different platforms.
>>
>> I'll leave it to others to compare the voice quality to versions you
>> each use and prefer.
>> corine
>>
>> On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Alex H. <linuxx64.bashsh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi Corine,
>>>
>>> Does this mean that you have found a classic version of DECTAlk to use
>>> for the sapi?
>>>
>>> Alex
>>>
>>> On 5/15/11, Corine Bickley <corine.bickley at gallaudet.edu> wrote:
>>>> Snoopi will be in charge of creating user dictionaries for Enable
>>>> products, such as SAPI DECtalk. We're not ready yet to announce the
>>>> release of SAPI DECtalk, but hope to be soon.
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Jayson Smith <ratguy at insightbb.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> Does anyone know how to create/generate/compile user dictionaries for
>>>>> the
>>>>> Speak windows? I know back in the days of the DECtalk PC, it shipped
>>>>> with
>>>>> software to take a properly-formatted text file and compile it into a
>>>>> binary
>>>>> dictionary file. I still have one of those files, and it doesn't work as
>>>>> a
>>>>> user dictionary in Speak43. Are there tools out there to generate user
>>>>> dictionaries, or are they pretty much just internal tools which should
>>>>> have
>>>>> been distributed but weren't? Snoopi, Ed, Corine, can anyone help here?
>>>>> Thanks.
>>>>>
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