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Luobot -

Tone changes:

Quote:

I think text to speech would do this

Question: How natural does it sound? If you're imitating it, you don't want to sound like a
monosyllable robot, or like something from a text-to-speech answering machine. If it’s something
that you wouldn’t mind sounding like in a job interview or dating situation, then fine.

Presently, if you listen to the example that I cited in ZDT, you'll notice that it isn't doing
tone changes at all. Bu4 Yao4 is Bu4 Yao4, not Bu2 Yao4. This is because these sounds are produced
as individual syllables spoken sequentially, rather than produced as one word.

Anyway, it would be great to have the freedom to link up any file of any type – voice, video,
whatever – which is what I’m suggesting.

This can coexist with the current or perhaps improved text-to-speech solution, as you suggest,
Chris willing.



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onebir -



Quote:

Question: How natural does it sound?

The free MS chinese voice isn't great, but it doesn't pronounce separate syllables separately, I
think it handles tone sandhi and some sentence intonation. There are better commercial voices
apparently (see MandarinBoy's thread)



Quote:

If you're imitating it

No one suggested imitating the computer. Text to speech would give the ability to generate audio
flashcards from text-only sources - which are more common than text + audio material - for
learning new words. People at/above about intermediate level will generally be able to pronounce
these, because they'll have already learned to pronounce the same syllables occurring in other
words...

If you have (much rarer) text+audio, sound files are the way to go for pronounciation purposes.
But creating sound files manually by editing audio is quite labour intensive. So people might like
to have the option of generating audio flash cards using text to speech even where they have audio.

So I agree it would be ideal to have functionality for both attaching sound files and text to
speech (perhaps with an override), which would suit different groups of users needs... (But this
would also involve several times more work for Chris I guess...)










Luobot -



Quote:

So I agree it would be ideal to have functionality for both attaching sound files and text to
speech ... which would suit different groups of users needs

So I guess we agree ... now, if only Chris agrees










bogleg -

I agree, I agree! =) I would probably say that (with no investigation) that attaching sounds to
entries would be a more likely feature for inclusion. I'm kind of doubtful that I would be able to
use a commercial text to speech product in open-source software. But i'll wait and see how
mandarinboy responds in his thread.

Chris










bogleg -

@flameproof

1: To make it start faster.

How long does the ZDT take to startup for you? On the computer I'm using at the moment, it takes
approximately 7 secs.

2: Import from Pleco

It's coming... slowly but surely. I'm working on a custom import function that I will make sure
supports Pleco.

3: can paste a group of characters into a folder (currently can only do one at a time)

You're talking about pasting into a category right? This should already be possible. You have to
put the characters on a separate line though. Let me know how you're trying to do it.

Chris










onebir -

@Luobot:
No harm done ;-)

@Chris:
The free MS chinese voice probably isn't adequate for listening comprehension/imitation, but I
thnk it's good enough it's fine for reading out words for memorization purposes (since you can
hear the syllables & tones, and it copes with tone sandhi). But I don't know if there are free
voices for Linux/Mac users...










Luobot -

Onebir -- Sorry
[I removed it from my original post because I misunderstood you, and therefore it was
inappropriate.]

Chris – I’m really excited about it!!! Thanks so much for agreeing!!!










bredmond812陈秉劲 -

maybe a link to Palm OS5 would be cool too. of course, it would need to use Big5 for traditional
and GB2312 for simplified, or there would need to be some way to convert it.










bogleg -

@bredmond812

Could you explain in more detail what you mean by "a link to Palm OS5"?










bredmond812陈秉劲 -

sure, i mean a way so that i can do the flashcards on Palm (whose operating system is OS 5) does
that make better sense?












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