Mohamed Al-Hajamy 💾This is the start of the #EloquenceResearchCommentary thread. This one will be primarily used for my own personal thoughts on the synth, as well as smaller or more technical findings that might not quite fit into the main research findings thread. These will probably be shorter posts with a much less formal tone.
Funny how IBM added the pronunciation of Enron to IBMTTS around February 2003, about a year or so after the company collapsed in spectacular fashion. They also fixed Aptiva, the name of a line of computers they produced, the pronunciation of which had been broken since 2000, about a year after they discontinued them. #EloquenceResearchCommentary
So Eloquence's maximum pitch is 422 Hz? The Korean version sincerely begs to differ... You might want to turn your volume down or wear headphones for this. This is the result of setting the pitch and inflection settings to their maximum, holding down the i key for several seconds, and then adding an exclamation mark. The Korean version of IBMTTS, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, fixed or didn't get this, but still screams a bit. #EloquenceResearchCommentary
An 1996 article from The New York Times about Everybody can Read, a program by Lew Robins that was designed to teach children to read and used Eloquence. Also contains some early audio samples of the synth. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0926read.html
#EloquenceResearchCommentary
#EloquenceResearchCommentary
On some products that used Eloquence, such as the BrailleNote from HumanWare or the PAC Mate from Freedom Scientific, there's a strange arrangement of libraries. The US English library, enu.syn, is running Eloquence 6.0, while all other languages are at 6.1. This isn't exclusive to just these products. I've seen a similar thing with COBRA, an old German screen reader. All languages are at version 6.1, except for US English which is at 5.0.1.8. I wonder if this was done for performance reasons or to save on licensing costs. #EloquenceResearchCommentary
@TheQuinbox @MutedTrampet Perhaps there was some phoneme or phonemes considered better-sounding in the old version.