Chips speech synthesizer?

rwgast_logicdesign

So I have been thinking about different ways to speech in my project, including an Emic or an Rpi. But the cheapest way would be to just directly use a propeller. I downloaded chips code the other day and ran the demo's. I have to say I don't know much about sound, and I definitely wont be able to follow this code with out a lot of work. What I was wondering is how well it actually works... Out of all the demos the one that says monster is the most impressive! Can one make that quality of speech using any word? The demo1 I think it is saying girl, is no where near the quality of the monster demo... so I am a bit thrown off as to what this object can actually do. Does anyone have a demo of it saying a full sentence? I don't mind learning the ins and outs of it, but I want to make sure it will work well first. I am looking for at least Emic2 quality speech.

Mike Green

I think it was Phil Pilgrim who wrote a phoneme front end for Chip's synthesizer. You may have to search the forum for it. You can get good pronounciation from Chip's object, but you'll have to carefully tune the phoneme stream for that ... and it's not a text to speech synthesizer. Most of the cost and value of the EMIC2 is in the text to phoneme translation. If you have only a few canned phrases or words that you need, you can't beat the price / performance of a Propeller that can do other things as well. If your needs are more complex or you just want something ready-to-go, then the EMIC2 is better.

Ken Gracey

What Mike said. Phil has added the most useful overlay's to Chip's code. I've used them quite a bit in the past, and with his permission I can post my Spin code. I used his speech phoneme tools last year with high school students who created numerical sensor feedback (and some profanity, of course). But it certainly works. Let me check with Phil for permission.

- Ken

rwgast_logicdesign

Well basically I have 3 projects I am working on right now my Sting Ray, my Micro Medic entry, and a custom clock in a crocheted "enclosure" for my girlfriend. Each one of these projects can benefit from speech, I cant really go with an Emic2 I don't have the money to buy 3 of them, and at this point in time I don't think any of them actually need the full power of an Emic2. So using Chip's and Phil's code is going to be the most practical path to take. I was thinking it may be viable to do real text to speech on a small vocabulary if you were to set up a dictionary in eeprom, this would contain a word and its corresponding phoneme stream. Basically you would write a function to search this file then play back it phoneme. This method would obviously have speed problems and practicality issues for huge dictionary file, but may work well for 100 words or so. I actually can't see needing more than 25-100 words unless you are trying to read back content from the net or something like that.

@Ken that would be awesome, it would give me a good base to start understanding the objects and how to tune phoneme streams.

I have searched the forums for Phil's object and I have found quite a few threads about it but in every one I have read he says the phoneme engine needs more tuning and does not work that well, so I'm not really sure if I have found the same code you guys are talking about.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

rw,

The version in this thread is current: http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/89411

It's not great, but it's all there is. Nonetheless, try it anyway; it might be adequate for your needs.

-Phil

Humanoido

Not only does the Propeller speech synthesizer talk, but it also sings. It's really a fantastic work of art by two masters. Phil is just being too modest. You can tune this code for the sound you want. I'm actually surprised no one has made a text to speech for it. It's also one of the best replacements for the machine sounding SPO256 speech chip used in older robots. This link may help.

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/124495-Fill-the-Big-Brain?p=977506&viewfull=1#post977506