From candide@urbanium.tv Wed Jan 02 23:06:20 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: candide@urbanium.tv X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_1_3); 3 Jan 2002 07:06:19 -0000 Received: (qmail 60341 invoked from network); 3 Jan 2002 07:06:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.167) by m4.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 3 Jan 2002 07:06:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO urbanium.urbanium.tv) (194.183.224.155) by mta1.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 3 Jan 2002 07:06:18 -0000 Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 08:06:24 +0100 Subject: Re: [lojban] a beginner's questions Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v480) Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com To: Randall Nortman In-Reply-To: <20020102150930.GA517@aerosol> Message-Id: <66522672-0018-11D6-A890-000393074A5A@urbanium.tv> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.480) Received: from 212.68.238.171.brutele.be ([212.68.238.171]) by urbanium.urbanium.tv (JAMES SMTP Server 1.2.1rc2) with SMTP ID 483; Thu, 3 Jan 2002 08:06:17 +0100 From: Candide Kemmler X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=92614944 > I looked into this myself a few months ago. It should be fairly > straightforward; from what I can tell, two things need to be done to > get any of the several freely-available TTS (text to speech) engines > to speak Lojban: > > 1) Write some code that converts written text to phonetic > representation (diphones or phenomes, including stress and pause > markers). For many languages this is very challenging, but for > Lojban it should be trivial. > > 2) Record and process lots of voice samples containing all the > basic sounds of the language in all their possible 2-sound > combinations. (The combinations are necessary in order to get > the transitions.) This is the time-consuming part. It should > be done entirely by one speaker. > > Alternatively, find a voice recorded for another language that > has all the same sounds as Lojban. English won't work (doesn't > have Lojban's 'x'). The resulting voice will sound a lot like > the language the voice was originally prepared for. > > I would be interested in helping out on such a project. Specifically, > I'll handle the first part (the easy part) if somebody will get the > recordings together for the second part. Great. This is immensely fun I think. I've already asked my local Apple dealer about de price of a good microphone. We have multimedia/video editing folks here, so I'm sure I'll get help aplenty. Unfortunately, I've tried to compile Flite on my iBook, and the architecture's not recognized; so I'll have to get me a Linux box in the office. Shouldn't be a problem anyway. Is Flite the right package to begin with ? When do we start ? (Pardon my enthousiasm...) Regards, Candide