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
Sean Randall@MutedTrampet It's interesting that the verson of eloquence we are all used to is quite ... fixed?
What I mean is, there are loads of DECtalk flavours floating about, yet I don't recall Eloquence changing much since the big move from 4.7. My ECI.dll that I am running today has copyright 1995-2002.
And I guess part of the longevity it enjos is it's perminence thorugh all the other changes? I dunno. Just rambling now.
@cachondo Yeah, the stability of the voice could be a part of what keeps it going. The PC version of Eloquence has pretty much never been recompiled since July 30, 2002, and I'm not aware of any major voice developments from SpeechWorks or Nuance after the introduction of the 16k sampling rate in the Symbian version. Maybe SpeechWorks decided it wasn't worth doing much with after that point? Who knows? To be honest, though, I wouldn't be surprised if not much can be done to develop the synth further at this stage, even if someone wanted to. The 90s papers mention that Eloquence was written in its own Delta programming language and compiled to C, so the source code might very well be a bunch of unreadable data tables that would require the original Delta files to understand.
miki@MutedTrampet @cachondo Considering that Apple is making its changes via dictionaries and not via modifying the original synths, I suspect that either the Delta code / tools have been lost, or are very deliberately not given out to customers.
@miki @MutedTrampet @cachondo Maybe I'm not understanding something here, if source code is not available, how possibly they could compile it to work in 64 architecture on IPhones??
@kaveinthran @MutedTrampet @cachondo As far as we know, there are two "stages" to the Eloquence compilation process.
Stage 1 compiles the source code written in Delta, a language to nicely express rules for transforming text into phonemes, into C++.
Stage2 takes that C++ code for stage1, along with the rest of Eloquence, which is also written in C++, and compiles that to whatever architecture it's supposed to be running on, just like a normal C++ program.
Apple can definitely do stage2, but we don't know whether they can do stage 1.