OK, so the sample mp3 aint wonderful, on the other half its not too bad either. Listening to it on crappy screenbeat3 speakers, it wasnt all that bad. Like Yn0t said, at least this will work and its a starting point!

Thanks for the efforts you've mae so far to this, and pleae dont let the griping interfere!

At the end of the day, how many other car stereos talk to you?

(Although I still want HAL to talk to me on boot up...)

In reply to:

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(Although I still want HAL to talk to me on boot up...)
...
Dave

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I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that....

(sorry couldn't resist making the joke)...

hehe, I programmed my empeg to have Hal greet me on bootup.

how did you do that ?
... me wants, too.

Check out these 2 threads. Somewhere posted there is the pcmplay program and my bootup init. Just make a similar init script and you'll have bootup sounds too.

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=empeg_general&Number=78613

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=hackers_prog&Number=74361

ok ok ok...

I guess I left myself wide open for that one

Damnit, I think I'm going to have to change my picture now. I don't want Domo-kun to kill me!!

*fear*

http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/apr/computervoices/index.html

Here's what I posted over a year and a half ago.

I'd still be interested in doing the same thing.

Eh-Ahem...

In reply to:

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altman
(addict)
05/10/99 10:46 AM
Voice prompts, including a self-recorded audio tag for your own presets (and all the "factory" voice prompts being in a replaceable/updateable playlist, so you can rerecord the prompts yourself) are on the to-do list, you'll be glad to know

Hugo

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Unless phat box's pending patent dates earlier than this...

IBM has ViaVoice running on the iPaq which I believe is the same processor as the empeg. Their "flagship" product does both speech recognition and TTS. Maybe we could do a group buy. ;^)
See more here: http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/enterprise/ms_evvee.html

IBM... "Inferior, But Marketable."

I dunno, given the responses above, it doesn't sound like people around here are very interested in TTS/voice prompting, so the concept of pooling our money and buying a closed-source product seems pretty far-fetched.

How much money does the cepstal guy want per license? I would be willing to pay for a voice that doesnt sound computerish and annoying.

Sean

Not sure, I can drop him another email. He's a professor at Carnegie Mellon, he does the Cepstral stuff in his free time. He seems partial to the ARM platform (he released v1.1 of flite wth ARM binaries) but more so due to the iPAQ. He didn't seem to have as much zest for the Empeg as the guy who's giving us a free Vorbis license, but I'll see what I can work out.

The problem is we'd need source code so we can graft in sample rate conversion and native use of the Empeg's quirky sound buffer. Not sure we'd be able to convince him to develop a custom Empeg version of Cepstral due to its sample rate/buffer size quirks.

See what he has to say on what it would take and how difficult it would be. Do we have any empeg owners that live in Pittsburgh that would be willing to demo the empeg for him? Once he sees how it works, he might be more interested in sharing source code under NDAs etc.

Maybe the empeg guys could give us some tips if they think it could be useful in a future product.

Sean

While surfing the cepstral site, I stumbled across a open source speech recognition system.

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/

It mentioned it was a decent candidate for embedded devices. Is this useful at all for the empeg? Any speech recognition experts around?

If you'd like to have a chance to try out an application that uses CMU Sphinx , try the Communicator, an experimental system that helps you plan air travel. You can reach it at the toll-free number 1-877-CMU-PLAN (1-877-268-7526) or at +1 412 268 1084.. The system will provide real flight information.

Sean

We're going in our own (commercial) direction with TTS. We got some of the free systems up and running and were not impressed.

Rob

In reply to:

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Do we have any empeg owners that live in Pittsburgh that would be willing to demo the empeg for him? Once he sees how it works, he might be more interested in sharing source code under NDAs etc.

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Better yet, I work at Carnegie Mellon. I should probably put my dash back together before I show it off.

Noise-Robust Speech Recognition Technology

Motorola Clamor™ software provides developers with a highly accurate, noise-robust, small vocabulary speech recognizer for use in a variety of electronic and computing applications. The Clamor software-based recognizer was designed to be specifically insensitive to ambient noise and to work with most languages. This makes it suitable for embedded command-and-control applications in phones, PDAs, stereos, set-top boxes, games, automotive equipment, and countless other products.

Speech recognition is coming of age in today's high-tech world. Mobile professionals need access to their pertinent data at all times, often in situations where having one's hands free is important. Imagine a situation in which you could navigate your voicemail system, moderate your car radio volume, or dial your cellular phone using only your voice. Clamor software enables these and many other scenarios in which mobile professionals will be able to access information on the fly.

Features:

Noise Robust - highly accurate even in noisy environments.
Works well in cars with windows open, airport lobbies or with loud music playing.
Dependable - Press-to-talk helps guarantee reliable recognition
Flexible Vocabulary - Up to 40 words or short phrases (up to two seconds in duration) active at one time.
Unlimited number of switchable dictionaries allows for expanded vocabularies.
Accommodates Multiple Users - More than one user can train the system for accurate recognition of his/her voice.
Only two repetitions needed to train each word or phrase.
Works Across Languages - Language independent system will work with virtually any language.
American and British English, French, German, Farsi, Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin have been tested.
Embedded Platforms:

Motorola's M*CORE®, 56166 and 56800 DSP series, ARM 610/710, StrongARM™, Intel™ X86, OS-9, Windows™ 98, NT and CE. Written in ANSI C, the Clamor software system is portable to most selected platforms.

Requirements:

Microprocessor capable of 10 MIPS or more is desirable
8kHz or 16kHz sampling rate
Nonvolatile memory is required to store user training data
ARM implementation requires 32K Flash for voice templates and 20K RAM for code and buffering
Response Time- One-second average response time with 13MHz ARM 610 implementation.
0.15 second average response time with Pentium™ 133 MHz Windows 95/98 implementation.
Recognition Engine Size- Hand assembled DSP implementation code size for the recognition engine is 1KB.
Speech templates are approximately 16KB for 10 words or short phrases (or .5KB for an average two second voice template)


Windows® evaluation SDK available.

http://www.okisemi.com/public/docs/PrdSpeech.html

Speech IC's for external dev.

I just tried calling that number, pretty neat. The voice recognition seems pretty accurate, don't know how it would do in a noisy area like the car though, maybe I should try calling on my cellphone while driving. What do you guys think of this?

Cool, too bad there isnt an evaluation version that someone could get working on the empeg.

Sean