Smartmouth's No Sweet Talker
SMARTMOUTH is an implementation of the allophone technique for
speech synthesis.
It produces speech by accessing individual sounds, and words
are built up by voicing these in quick succession. It is thus
not necessary to know how a word is spelled but how it sounds!
You can then build up the word phonetically using one allophone
after another.
Smartmouth comes in a small plastic box with an inbuilt speaker.
There is also an audio output for connection to an amplifier if
required. It attaches externally to the BBC Micro, power and data
being supplied from the micro via the user port. There are two
programs on cassette and a six page manual to help you master
its working.
The programs consist of a development aid and a demonstration
of its use. The manual has a table of the 64 allophones provided,
some hints on how to get the best out of the unit, instructions
on how to access the unit from a program and a single page of
examples. This is very helpful though it would have been useful
to have more examples supplied.
The speech from this unit is understandable but not of the same
quality as from the Acorn speech ROM. The voice lacks any intonation
and really sounds like a computer. It is, however, very easy to
produce new words once you get used to what the allophones sounds
like.
It is also worth remembering that even a lengthy word such as
"synthesiser" can be formed in only 11 bytes so memory overheads
are negligible.
Paul Taylor
