Re: [css3-speech][ISSUE-271] gneutralh voice

Apple's NSSpeechSynthesizer defines

"NSVoiceGenderNeuter
A neutral voice (or a novelty voice with a humorous or whimsical quality)."

My experience has been that Neuter or Neutral will usually give a voice that is not obviously of one gender or another, either because it sounds robotic or because as noted above it is a voice which is more humorous than practical. 



On Jul 23, 2012, at 9:55 PM, Sebastian Zartner <sebastianzartner@gmx.de> wrote:

> To me 'neutral' in this case means a voice you just can't distinguish if it's male or female. It doesn't mean that it should be robotic. I believe people prefer human-like voices instead of artificial voices.
> 
> Sebastian
> 
> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
>> Datum: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:45:50 +1000
>> Von: Jon Rimmer <jon.rimmer@gmail.com>
>> An: www-style@w3.org
>> Betreff: Re: [css3-speech][ISSUE-271] gneutralh voice
> 
>> On 24/07/2012 11:45 AM, fantasai wrote:
>>> On 07/23/2012 05:51 PM, Jon Rimmer wrote:
>>> 
>>>> If it were the former, the speech engine would default to a male
>>>> voice, but if it were the latter, it would use a distorted or
>>>> robotic voice.
>>> 
>>> Or maybe just raise the pitch to a more neutral range. I doubt
>>> 'neutral' is intended to mean "inhuman". :)
>> 
>> That's what I thought, but when I looked at the Java speech API, I found 
>> that it documents the GENDER_NEUTRAL constant as "Neutral voice that is 
>> neither male or female (for example, artificial voices, robotic 
>> voices)." [1]. Microsoft's .NET API doesn't provide any detail [2]. 
>> It'll depend on the implementation of the speech synthesis I suppose, 
>> but it seems possible some may use novelty voices if that's what's 
>> installed and available.
>> 
>> It's worth nothing that both APIs define a separate "no preference" 
>> option as well, so an auto value would seem to be required.
>> 
>> [1] 
>> http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17802_01/products/products/java-media/speech/forDevelopers/jsapi-doc/javax/speech/synthesis/Voice.html#GENDER_NEUTRAL
>> [2] 
>> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.speech.synthesis.voicegender.aspx<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms586874.aspx>
>> 
>> 
>