Re: IPA Text-to-Speech

I don't think this could work terribly well.  For now, at least.  Of course,
what do I know about "Cool Edit" and the real cutting edge stuff out there?
:)  In my experience, most contemporary voice recognition programs operate
on a level far less complex than your actual enunciation (a step above
lip-reading, to use an analogy), and I don't think anybody could honestly
say, at this stage of our technological expertise, that the text readers are
accurate renditions of pronunciation, although they are intelligible.  A
program would have to be far more complex than even our most complete IPA to
get timber, nuance, pitch, inflection, the minute changes that occur when a
sound is proximate to another sound, and so forth.  Think of the subtle
distinctions between a French "r" and a German "r"; and how in German the
gutteral "r" (at least for me) will be different depending on what vowel or
consonant comes in front of it (I can do a reasonable uvular trill for back
vowels, but that changes for front vowels, and it's almost impossible for me
after any consonant except "k"; after "t" it sounds like a French uvular
scrape).   It will always sound like a machine speaking, with that
machine-sameness.   And as for writing what you speak, think of all the
kinks that have to be ironed out.  If it's overly sensitive, you'll get an
unreadable bunch of gobbledygook depending on the speech patterns of any
individual.  It's a great idea to aim for, but I think it will take a lot of
new work to produce useable results, and until then I'd prefer to learn
German pronunciation from an actual German.  But I can see the technical
appeal of such a project.

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Trebor Jung" <treborjung@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2004 12:07 PM
Subject: Re: IPA Text-to-Speech


> Outo wrote: "Hi. I was wondering if there is such a thing as an IPA
> text-to-speech program, or something similar. What I mean is, a program
that
> when you speak, it transcribes what you said using IPA symbols, and if you
> write words in the IPA it will speak them to you. I think this type of
thing
> would be useful in a number of ways, mainly for linguists, but for other
> people too. For example, if you wanted you to know you were pronouncing a
> word correctly in another language, then you would be able to check if you
> said it correctly, because you could see exactly what you said and where
you
> went wrong, and it would work for every language. (The whole intention of
> the IPA, lol). So I was wondering if such a program exists, or if not, is
it
> possible to make one?"
>
> If anyone is going to create such a program, it would be very nice if
> X-Sampa was also an option, so people who can't view IPA properly could
> still have access to the program.
>
> T
>

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