Re: [css3-speech] voice-family

Another point to consider is that children's voices often sound very  
feminine. So when the author's preference is "male 10 year old", a  
reasonable system match for the specified voice characteristics may  
well be "Lucy: female [20-45] years old".
/Daniel

On 6 Jul 2011, at 20:10, Daniel Weck wrote:

> On 6 Jul 2011, at 18:20, fantasai wrote:
>>> Since we explicitly leave the matching algorithm up to the  
>>> synthesizer it
>>> might even be necessary to write something like:
>>>
>>> voice-family: 60 male, 60 female, 30 male, 30 female;
>>>
>>> The intent here is to prefer a mature male voice if one is  
>>> available, with
>>> a mature female next, followed by an adult male etcetera.  
>>> Essentially trying
>>> prioritize age over gender.
>>
>> What happens if I have a male voice that's 55 years old? Do I use  
>> that, or
>> fall back to 60-year-old female?
>
> Well, a concrete voice instance available on the user's system is  
> likely to support an age range. So your example would actually be  
> more accurate as such: I have a "male voice suitable for 40-50 years  
> old", which would not get selected based on the author's criteria  
> "60 male" (nor would it based on any of the other author-provided  
> alternatives).
>
> So I think we are missing prose similar to font-family for defining  
> the mapping between a generic voice-family and "best-match"  
> candidates on the user's system:
>
> ---
> User agents should provide reasonable default choices for the  
> generic font families, which express the characteristics of each  
> family as well as possible within the limits allowed by the  
> underlying technology.
> User agents are encouraged to allow users to select alternative  
> choices for the generic fonts.
>
> ---
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#generic-font-families
>
>
>
>

Daniel Weck
daniel.weck@gmail.com

Received on Wednesday, 6 July 2011 19:20:41 UTC