AT&T Labs is commercializing their recent advances in text-to-speech processing (a.k.a. talking computers) with Natural Voices. While the live demo still reveals its robotic ancestry, a few of the pre-recorded demos could really pass for human. Listen to one of the better samples (70Kb Windows Media).
It’s a big step from the standard text-to-speech quality available only a few years ago (hear a sample).
And so the anthropomorphization of robots inches forward.
I just finished watching ‘Short Circuit’. Now /there/ are some nice robot voices.
It even features that great robot voice that I had originally fallen in love with. I remember playing with the old SoundBlaster software making it order pizzas then shouting “PENIS” (in a silly ‘yeah, like i care’ robot voice) when I was in grade six.
Many people call this voice the ‘Dr. Spaitso’ voice, but I think the software had a catchy title. It was also featured in that fun robot-cartoon ‘Bots Master’ about some guy who made robots who were intelligent (like Johnny Five, who only wanted to love).
Part of public school education in Ontario, if you’re within a couple of hours drive of Toronto, is a yearly visit to the Ontario Science Centre. My favourite exhibit at the Science Centre was a machine that would say the word “coffee” over and over again; it had switches that allowed you to vary the pitch and speed of the delivery. It was amazing.
There was also a machine that had a phonetic keyboard, a very early speech synthesizer. You could enter various complicated phonemes, and get it to say pretty well anything. As you can imagine, most of our time at this machine was spent getting it to saying things that usually came out as something like “fewewuk arfhhh”.
Whoa… big blast from the past, Peter. I was a Mississaugian from birth to seven when I moved east. Playing x’s and o’s with the computer on a 20 foot screen. My rude language interests were milder so we were probably only making the speech software say “bum”.
hi vanessa
There was no rain, no fall, no dawn. Until the human like robots existed, there was no real story I could write. Humans are boring but robots are never boring because fewer people know what they really are. A comic called, “Revenge Is Not The Answer” is a robot only story. About a young 18-year-old girl that turned a serial killer’s life around from hate to love. With a little help from Vaness and her husband, Daimon, and her daughter, Ironia(eye-rone-nee-ah). Collin fell in love with Ironia after breaking up with his greedy, girlfriend. AI Soames (Soe-mes)too had a love problem because he was married to Emmy when he first met Somebody Rodatey (Row-date-tee). After Somebody’s husband died of the uncurable skin cancer, she made love with AI and he finally divorced Emmy, who ditched him twice during his first two years of his marriage. Captain Jean Rowling was in charge of the whole army when he met Claire, the love of his life. Robin fell for Rubin Rodatey (Somebody and him aren’t relatives), after his mom, Morlana (more-lawn-nah)betrayed him long ago. Jay at first wanted to marry the captain’s ex, not so real ficanee,
Natalie Burlinn but Vaness and the Captain caught him in the act. So he then met the snobby Lara Laramee’s (Lara-meh’s) youngest sister, Edy. She was fairly a 4’7″ dwarf but she was very beautiful and loved him. Lara hated her for not being a tomboy, tough woman like her. She married a policeman that almost arrested her named, Gene Golitely, a man that Andrew Jeezliey (Jeez-lee) absolutely hated for taking away his cross-bow. Never mind about the rest because Keisha married Moral and lived happily.
This is the story that everybody will love so read that comic and you will love that movie also.