RE: interpretation please, ssml

 

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Andrew Thompson
    > Summary?
    >   No, don't expect good pronunciation for 'non-normal'
    > words such as café ?
    >
    > That seems to be the case, but I can't find it in the WD.
    
    It wouldn't really be practical to have requirements on 
    what a French word in the middle of otherwise English text 
    would sound like (to use your café example) because it'll 
    be synthesizer vendor specific.

And it doesn't say that either? I.e. a user (nor an implementor)
has no guidance on what to expect.
In this case I'd consider it an English word, but that's just my
opinion.

    
    Reasonably speaking, for French words that have been 
    adopted into English (resumé, café etc) then I'd expect 
    most synthesizers can handle these simple cases. In 
    particular I could see an English synth knowing how to 
    handle acute accents.

But that's an opinion, not a statement from the WD?

    
    I'd be a bit more surprised if your average English 
    synthesizer could handle "In Japanese, 'ありがとう' means 'thank 
    you'" randomly put in the middle of a sentence without any 
    markup to indicate the bit in the middle is lang="jp".

Likewise. I did state the contextual xml:lang was en.

    
    It all depends... perhaps the next generation of 
    synthesizers will understand Unicode and have voices 
    capable of pronouncing multiple languages enabled. Even 
    this in and of itself isn't enough to guarantee correct 
    output. After all, 本 could be Japanese or Chinese, there's 
    no particular way to tell without context, and this applies 
    to European languages too. Markup indicating the language 
    will always be necessary unless one day computers can 
    actually understand the meaning of what's being said.
    
    Actually I think the spec does answer your question:
    http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/#AppF
    
Which is informative?

   
    And then it goes on to define how to improve the 
    pronunciation with an external lexicon.

Yes, thats a reasonable solution.

    
    As I said, it'll ultimately be vendor specific.

No, its undefined in the WD, which I now believe to be a weakness
easily addressed by the WG.

regards DaveP.

** snip here **



    

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Received on Monday, 2 August 2004 03:14:35 UTC