Well, for one thing here, is if you use things like SAPI voices. Qute a
number of these, if not all, have no tone - and many not even a pitch -
setting. So for all of those, your app might have little effect, the way you
describe it.
I know, many claim you can't switch voices on the fly. Not fully sure about
it. TextAloud, a document reading software, is switching sapi voices with no
lack in time. And has been doing so for years. Might be the way they handle
the voices, as compared to the way WE does the job.
You idea of different voice settings for different info, is a pretty good
one, which has been a lack for long time. Smile. Guess, Eloquence and
DecTalk will be the two dedicated voices to handle, then you have the
USB/Serial ones (of which I do not know too much under Windows), and then
you would pretty much have to deal with the box of SAPI voices - far as I
know. Surprising few SAPI voices are produced with too much for adjustment,
except from speed. Of course, your app could either slow down or speed up a
bit, or - in case of info that has to stand out - you might want to break
the line/sentence up in single words, sending one and one word by its own
SPEAK command.
This,
Would,
Make,
The,
Line,
Stand,
Out,
a,
Bit,
More.
Hope you find a way, since this sure could be useful in quite a few cases.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chip Orange" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2011 2:09 AM
Subject: voice parameters
Hi all,
I've been working with an app which has different voice settings to convey
different information (optionally).
I don't want just to allow the user to edit all the voice parameters
(although I will eventually), but I'd like to come up with reasonably good
guesses as to what would make a different sounding voice for any number of
situations (so the user wouldn't have to do any setup work if they didn't
want to).
I've found varying the tone, which changes what we would call the voice,
to
be the best way of achieving this (better than adjusting the pitch; it
yields voices which are more distinguishable from one another and still
understandable).
Unfortunately, I think you have no way of knowing what tone values you
assign will yield a change in the voice. For Eloquence, I think it's tone
values of "I" through "M", and for DEC-Talk Access32 it's "H" through "P"
(I think).
That unfortunately is all I know, and if the user is using some other
synthesizer, then my app will fail. So, I was wondering if people who use
other synthesizers would send me the range of tone settings for their
particular model of synthesizer which yield different voices?
I'd be glad eventually to publish this as a class so others can benefit.
Steve has already started me off with nice code for a class which makes it
easy to switch between various grouped values, and to store them as a
voice
"specification".
Just an FYI, I believe you can't switch synthesizers on the fly, the way
you
can adjust the tone setting, because you'll get simultaneous speech from
both, or the switch doesn't happen exactly when you need it to (something
like that), so adjusting the tone/pitch of your currently selected synth
is
the only way I know to deal with this need in general. I'd be glad to
hear
differently though.
thanks for any help.
Chip
