[DECtalk] Intelligibility/Listenability criteria

[Don]

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!"