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Jun 4, 1998, 2:12am

I've been recently checking out onlive traveler (shhh you didnt hear
this) and i think aw would be so great if we had voice!!

--
Helen Christensen
(Midnight Madness)
Circle of Fire Studios
Public Relations
http://www.activeworlds.com
ICQ #121150

Jun 5, 1998, 1:49am

Umm, there's no way I'm talking with my voice :)
Not until Bandwidth is big enough to hold my voice :)
Any ways, I'm sooo addicted to my computer that I actually type faster than
I type :) Haa haa haa

Jun 6, 1998, 8:24am

If you pardon the pun, hear, hear! I to visited the travler place a long
time ago. The voice part of it made it real fun. As far as banwidth, it
couldnt be to bad with the new compression types out there.
+
[View Quote]

Jun 7, 1998, 6:07am

Well, is a room full of people, I think voice would have to be limited to
only a few at most in order to keep from maxing out the cable modem
connectsions and T1 lines that the privilaged few who could make good use of
it are connected to the Internet by. As for those of us running on a 14.4
Kbps connection, it would be a waste of memory to have it in the program.
Probably best "for now" to run your voice connection through a program
that's specifically designed for it (and probably not much good for anything
else) and keep this one on a back burner for AW until the hardware
technology catches up. <= My opinion.

TechnoZeus

[View Quote]

Jun 7, 1998, 1:10pm

I have advocated something a bit simpler in the past. I like the
text-to-speech (tts) capability of Powwow. With a flick of a switch, the
text in the chat window is sent to a tts program. The program mispronounces
words like crazy, but you can follow the conversation without having to look
at the screen. If implemented in AW, tts would allow you to keep the
browser minimized or hidden behind other windows while working on other
things. You would hear it when someone tried to initiate a chat you. Also,
tts, unlike true voice, would not add anything to bandwidth. It would run
totally on the client side.

The Powwow tts is not very good, but it is functional. I wonder if it would
be possible to use Festival, which is a very good tts program. One can get
Festival with the free speech processing Toolkit from the Oregon Graduate
Institute's Center for the Study of Language Understanding (CSLU) at
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/.

[View Quote]

Jun 7, 1998, 2:52pm

ah, cool richard, i always liked TTS in powwow also.
PT



[View Quote] > I have advocated something a bit simpler in the past. I like the
> text-to-speech (tts) capability of Powwow. With a flick of a switch, the
> text in the chat window is sent to a tts program. The program mispronounces
> words like crazy, but you can follow the conversation without having to look
> at the screen. If implemented in AW, tts would allow you to keep the
> browser minimized or hidden behind other windows while working on other
> things. You would hear it when someone tried to initiate a chat you. Also,
> tts, unlike true voice, would not add anything to bandwidth. It would run
> totally on the client side.
>
> The Powwow tts is not very good, but it is functional. I wonder if it would
> be possible to use Festival, which is a very good tts program. One can get
> Festival with the free speech processing Toolkit from the Oregon Graduate
> Institute's Center for the Study of Language Understanding (CSLU) at
> http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/.
>
[View Quote]

Jun 8, 1998, 2:39am

Me too.

TechnoZeus

[View Quote]

Jun 12, 1998, 12:32am

Now that I could live with. No additional bandwidth used up.

Paul

[View Quote]

Apr 30, 2000, 11:33am

Hi,

I was looking into this the other day and found WinSpeech. It's only
$48 and when used in combination with Clip&Talk (free) it detects
changes in any text window of your choice and speaks them as they
happen. It even has DDE support so (bot?) programmers can use it as a
speech engine.

http://www.pcww.com/index.html

ReneS

On Tue, 13 Jul 1999 13:33:44 -0400, Jonathan Rand <Jrand44 at aol.com>
[View Quote] >I'm hardly even a tourist yet, at AW 'cause my hardware can't handle it. But
>I've been dreaming about these type of worlds for a long time. I did a radio
>show, years ago, on VR for people with disabilities.
>
>Even when I'm finally able to enter AW, without crashing every 10 minutes, my
>poor vision will prevent me from communicating through the chat window.
>
>It's possible the "VoiceAssist", from Creative Labs, might work for something
>like this, BUT, an inexpensive text reader program only reads from the screen in
>certain circumstances. PowWow, seems to have a "say-on" feature. It reads
>things as they appear on the screen. I have "TextAssist", and it only reads
>what you select, and if the text can't be selected, you outta luck! The "real"
>'screen readers', for the blind and visually disabled, can do just about
>anything. In addition to having many different voices, you can create your own,
>but they cost tons of money! $700, $800, or more! They take up a lot of
>processor time though, and I'm not sure how much it would slow everything else
>down.
>
>Also, I think, having voice synthesizers instead of the actual voices of users,
>is much cooler. You can look any way you want, in AW. . . How 'bout sounding
>any way you want, also?
>
>I'd like to check out Travelers Online, and also, Holodest. Holodesk has
>voice. I'm not sure how good it is, but as soon as I do some needed work on my
>computer, I can find out! I wanna work to open these worlds to interested
>disabled people. The dream, is to be able to leave your disability behind when
>you enter the virtual world, but unfourtunately, for now, at least, I, for one,
>am much more disabled in VR, than in RL!!
>
>Check out the "blind users" newsgroup. Most of these people have been using TTS
>software for ages. Maybe in the future there'll be a way to change the way the
>virtual envirnment is seen, so those with very poor vision can use it better.
>

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