[DECtalk] Intelligibility/Listenability criteria

[Brandon Tyson]

Hello,

These are all really good points. I've been exclusively using Mac and
iOS lately so have been using Alex extensively. In reading the sample
text you sent, like "don't desert your friend in the desert") I was
amazed that Alex was able to differentiate between the contexts and
read it appropriately. No system is going to be 100 percent perfect,
for instance, in the above sentence Alex says "red" instead of "reed".
I misspelled read on purpose in order to make sure that any
synthesizer will speak it properly.

However, if someone asks whether you will read a book, then Alex
should be able to make this distinction, which it appears to.

Thanks,

Brandon

On 7/23/19, Jayson Smith <jaybird at bluegrasspals.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> You bring up many interesting points and problems.
>
> One thought that just came to my mind is Stephen Hawking. For many years
> he used a speech synthesizer called the CallText 5010 by Speech Plus.
> But unlike most members on this list, this device was his voice, period.
> This obviously means people who were not accustomed to speech synthesis
> were exposed to his synthetic voice. This is especially true in the 80's
> and 90's, when synthetic speech wasn't nearly as mainstream as it is now
> E.G. no Alexa/Google/Siri, no or very few synthetic voiced robocalls
> reminding you of doctor appointments, etc. His voice sounded similar to
> DECtalk, so the two were often confused, to the point that the DECtalk
> article on Wikipedia claims that Hawking used a form of DECtalk. The
> interesting thing about this particular synthesizer is that an emulation
> of it was completed, to be used by Hawking, a few months before his
> death. This brings this classic voice into the modern world, but
> unfortunately I assume it's likely that none of us will ever get a
> chance to play with it. According to an article, the source code was
> turned over to the Hawking estate, which certainly has reason to protect
> that particular voice. I know one friend who's told me that if this
> voice were made available, he'd use it as his default screen reader voice.
>
> As I see it, the problem with your scenario of the crippled voice in the
> earpiece is that you can't please everyone no matter how hard you try.
> Ideally, if the big box in the closet can send synthetic speech to the
> earpiece once the user is properly authenticated, that's an audio
> stream, so it should be able to send a pre-recorded file to
> unauthenticated/unregistered users. This pre-recorded file could be
> spoken by a more capable synthesizer, or even by an actual human, who
> can clearly state the message. If spoken by a human, in theory that
> human would know, or could find out, how to properly pronounce unusual
> names, places, etc.
>
> This leaves our poor crippled synthesizer in the earpiece to deal with
> those situations where no big box can be reached at all, or a situation
> has arisen for which no canned recording is available. Once again, you
> can't please everybody. If you're designing the big boxes and writing
> their documentation, you can include best practices to insure that when
> administrators write error messages, they make them as friendly to the
> particular synthesizer you've chosen as possible. But that doesn't mean
> the admins have to follow your recommendations. And then maybe there's
> the newbie admin who is rushing through installation and configuration
> and just wants to get this up and running as quickly as possible, skims
> through your docs briefly, and some poor user who needs to register gets
> the following mess, spoken by their earpiece's crippled synthesizer:
>
> Sorry we dont recognise your device ID. Please clal dr Johnson at
> 8178446611 Tahnk you
>
> Now for those situations where no big box can be found at all, assuming
> you're in control of the firmware for the earpieces, you know exactly
> how your crippled synthesizer works, and can work around any quirks it
> has in order to provide the most understandable messages possible.
>
> I hope this helps,
>
> Jayson
>
> On 7/23/2019 1:10 PM, Don wrote:
>> On 7/23/2019 6:38 AM, Jayson Smith wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> A few points here.
>>> First, I think it's a little of both pronunciation and the voice
>>> itself that
>>> gets on my nerves with ESpeak.
>>>
>>> Second, I'd argue that Alex and Alexa do have to contend with
>>> unrestrained
>>> input. If I go into my Alexa web portal and put
>>> "Sfjsaofhdsahbfiuewfbhifgbfvbiuewqfbirewqfbiwfbiubifdsava" on my
>>> shopping list,
>>> then ask her to read my shopping list, she's going to have to deal
>>> with that
>>> horrible mess of text.
>>
>> Yes, but what does it end up saying?  And, I suspect it says whatever
>> in a very specific context:  "I'm sorry, I don't find anyone who is
>> selling 'Sfjsaofhdsahbfiuewfbhifgbfvbiuewqfbirewqfbiwfbiubifdsava'".
>>
>> It doesn't have to contend with trying to apply prosody to
>> incomplete sentences or a meaningless series of words:
>> "Bob went snigglepuss"  "Here is teh mising peas of the puzl"
>>
>> I can ensure that all of the messages that I generate for the
>> synthesizer (either synthesizer!) are grammatically correct.  I
>> can craft them in such a way as to avoid difficult pronunciations.
>> Or, to exploit known text normalization patterns (e.g., presenting
>> "2,019" to the synthesizer when I want it to say "two thousand and
>> nineteen" instead of "twenty nineteen".)
>>
>> But, I can't guarantee that folks who extend my design will be
>> as disciplined.  Yet, the user will have to contend with the
>> "input text" chosen by those folks for their extensions!
>>
>> I don't think it is acceptable (or ethical) to say "that's not
>> MY problem!"
>>
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