Re: T.E.O.'s Draft--Cascading Speech Style Sheets

On Wed, 21 Feb 1996, T. V. Raman wrote:
> I find the proposal from Europe overly simple and catering to only
> low-level speech devices.

Dear Raman:

We agree with you that is a simple proposal. That's what we want to make
it easy to use so that people with few knowledge about speech could not 
choose wrong parameters. It's oriented to the actual devices, the ones that
most people can afford. It's something neccesary for many people and they
need it as soon as possible. It's the difference between knowing about 
the information in the Web or nothing about it.

If we tried to make a complicated definition of the speech, perhaps we would 
agree with you, but we are trying to make it simple, useful and very easy to
change from one definition to another by the user. We think this way is easier
than the number of decibels, where the user should know to make his own style
sheet how what decibels are. In fact really few people know about this 
(engineers, Physics and so on). To make it easy we let people decide between
a set of relative values that will be mapped by expert people to the real
values in the synthesizer. 
	
When a user wants to write his personal CSSS, he can try any of the
available values, and it will work because they will be mapped to real
and typical values. With your specification someone could try with
an average-pitch of 5 Hertzs, but it will sound bad. We prefer to let 
people choose a relative number than an exact and perhaps wrong number
of average pitch for example.
   
We try to make understandable speech, but we think that it's
difficult to make a speech synthesizer speaking in all the dialects
of all the world's countries, as you suggest in your draft. It
could be possible, but not many people could afford it. We are just
thinking to make easy for the final user and with the devices that
are now mostly used, so that this could be working soon because there
are many people that needs it very much as soon as possible.


Best regards,

Juanjo

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Juan Jose Miguez Iglesias

Kath. Universiteit Leuven            | Phone : +32 16 32 18 66
Dept. Electrotechniek (ESAT), T.E.O. | 
Kard. Mercierlaan 94                 | Fax   : +32 16 32 19 86 
B-3001 LEUVEN - HEVERLEE  

E-mail:Juanjo.Miguez@esat.kuleuven.ac.be
       jmiguez@ait.uvigo.es	
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Received on Wednesday, 28 February 1996 05:16:39 UTC