Re: dectalk etc. vs soundblaster (fwd)

[Davies Mark <M W Davies datasci co uk>]

I have heard people talking about the slow response from TextAssist as a
speech source, but does anyone know if the new software-only version of
DEC Talk just released has addressed these kinds of issues?

If anyone has any experience of it I'm sure we'd all be interested in
this potentially interesting development.

Mark

 ----------
From: Travis Siegel
To: blinux-list redhat com
Cc: The recipient's address is unknown.
Subject: Re: dectalk etc. vs soundblaster (fwd)
Date: 26 January 1997 11:31

On Sun, 26 Jan 1997, John Schucker wrote:

> I realize this is slightly offtopic, but ... many DOS spech packages
> allow you to use the sblaster as a synth?  The only one I know of is
> tinytalk.

Asap for windows is another that lets you use the soundblaster as a
speech
synthesizer.  I know there's more, but w/o looking at my
ftp://softcon.com/speech/index.htm file, I can't tell you for sure just
now. *grin*

> BTW, one way in which the sblaster is slow is in response time, and I'm
> not really sure if anybody can really overcome that in code.  And I'm not
> sure how this would map to linux, but in DOS, the sblaster's speech
> driver is a memory hog.  It can't actually do speech itself, which is
> what the driver is needed for.

It's slow, mainly because it offers no facilities for speech buffer
flushing.  Thus, there's no real way to tell the card to shut up when
you
press say the alt key.  Therefore, the speech programs need to feed text
to it a bit more slowly, so that they can stop the speech themselves
when
required to do so.  There's other problems with it too.  Download asaw,
and read it's documentation section on soundblaster to see why it's not
a
recomended interface, but if it's all ya got, then it's certainly better
than nothing.

Http://softcon.com offers web pages for a reasonable rate, and will even
create pages for you at *very* fair rates.  Check us out today if you're
looking for a home for your web pages.


 ---
Send your message for blinux-list to blinux-list redhat com
Blinux software archive at ftp://leb.net/pub/blinux
Blinux web page at http://leb.net/blinux
To unsubscribe send mail to blinux-list-request redhat com
with subject line: unsubscribe