[DECtalk] User dictionaries for Speak windows

[Corine Bickley]

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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