[DECtalk] update on fonixTalk in other languages

[Carlos Fernandez]

I do speak Chinese, so I feel relatively confident in my judgement of 
the system in that language. There are other Chinese speech engines that 
are much better, as you have said. There are three reasons that I knew 
the sample text was in Korean:
1. My friend, while finding the speech ridiculously inaccurate, was able 
to understand what was said.
2. Korean uses a different symbol set than Chinese, Japanese, and 
Russian. In fact, Korean does not share its characters with any other 
language. Were this from another language, there would have been no output.
3. I have heard Korean spoken, and it was easy to hear some of the same 
verbal elements. For example, many sentences in Korean end in something 
that sounds like "im ee da" with a different set of consonants preceding 
it. This was clearly evident in the sample text.
I agree that dectalk has always failed to get a good British accent. 
That is probably why there just isn't one in fonixTalk. Only U.S. is 
available.

Carlos

On 7/26/2015 04:46, Tony Baechler via Dectalk wrote:
> I would disagree.  I do not speak other languages except English, but 
> I do know there are Chinese speech synthesizers.  Do you yourself 
> speak the language for which you were launching the sample text?  In 
> other words, if you yourself are not familiar with the language, how 
> do you know the text was even written in hat language?  I am not 
> doubting you, but I am trying to make a point.  As you probably know, 
> there are synthesizers for Spanish, German, Italian, etc.  If you take 
> a piece of English text and have the Italian language synthesizer read 
> it, it will sound like English with an Italian accent.  Unless you are 
> quite certain that the text is in fact Korean and not Chinese, 
> Russian, Japanese or English, you could be running into a similar 
> situation.  The better way would be for her to type a few sentences in 
> her native language and have it read back the text.  All of that being 
> said, I found the DECtalk 4.61 British English to be terrible to the 
> point that I switched my firmware back to 4.2CD American English. I 
> should also note that I've heard a number of British and Australian 
> people mention that they use American English synthesizers.  For 
> software speech, I prefer British English myself.
>
> On 7/25/2015 6:03 PM, Carlos Fernandez via Dectalk wrote:
>> Well hello. I recently had the opportunity to meet up with an old friend
>> whose parents are Korean. While this friend is not fluent in Korean, she
>> does speak it well. I decided to launch up fonixTalk, pop in the sample
>> Korean text, and demonstrate it for her. Her only reaction was 
>> uproarious
>> laughter followed by, "What is this?". I believe this speaks to fonix's
>> general inability when it comes to Asian languages.
>>
>> Carlos
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