China the Beautiful

chinapage · Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 12:49 pm Post subject: computer-generated speech

Ever since the invention of computers, there were challenges
to write programs to read and generate speeches.

Earlier efforts were very poor and useless. At the beginning
of this web site, some 15 years ago, we reported on the
experimental work coming from Bell Laboratories, that
showed the concept is theoretically feasible.

Since then, there has been much progress. You can now
enter Chinese in pinyin, and get back speech instantly!

Try it out at the following url.

http://www.languagespace.com/

In another decade, I am sure that this will be everywhere.

Ming

sllee · Joined: 10 Jul 2002 Posts: 731 Location: USA

Dear Ming,

Is there a good Chinese voice input software? I know IBM has one but have not tried it. Anybody?
_________________
SL Lee
http://www.asiawind.com

chinapage · Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 11:26 am Post subject:

Dear SL:

You brought up the question of "speech recognition", which is
an entirely different matter - how do you understand speech?

There are 3 ways to input text:
(1) keyboard
(2) pen pad
(3) voice (microphone)

One of earliest pioneers of speech recognition is Dragon Speech,
which worked very hard in not just sppech recognition, but
Chinese speech recognition.. Their company was sold to IBM
which used their technology mostly to expand speech recongnition
for English.. Later, IBM sold the company back, which is now
independent.

I bought a copy of the software some years ago, but did not
spend much time to use it.

One big problem is the fact that each person speaks with a
different accent. This requires the software to go through a
training period. This is harder for Chinese then for English.

I do not expect the technology to develop fully for another ten
years perhaps.

If we input using keyborad (pinyin) or by handwriting ( pen pad),
we can avoid this problem.

I use pen pad, which works very well and is quite popular.

Ming

Aolung · Joined: 10 Jul 2002 Posts: 1037

Dear Ming,
the voice in (American) English to me seems quite excellent b/c natural even in its syntactical intonation.
As for the Chinese, it's pretty hard differentiating many initial (but also some final) consonants.
There actually is a distinction in sound (tone) between single words and words in a sentence (a good and necessary feature), yet some single words don't have the correct tone. E.g. try yu3 (rain) as a single word.

Regards

Alfred