[HN Gopher] DECtalk Archive
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DECtalk Archive
Author : classichasclass
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-04-29 02:09 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dectalk.nu)
(TXT) w3m dump (dectalk.nu)
| larusso wrote:
| Yeah reminds me about the weird way Apple provides multi language
| support for iMessage announcements over AirPods. I'm from Germany
| and my phone is set to English because of job related reasons. I
| message a lot of people in English and the family and friends in
| German. Siri used to be set to German and in the past was either
| not cape-able to read English messages or butchered the message.
| Sometimes it simply says it can't read it. For a year or so some
| messages will be read by a computer voice similar to DECtalk. I
| have no clue when the system decides to use it because it happens
| randomly. Now I switched Siri to English for Apple Intelligence
| and it got a bit better. But it's still strange though.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31427032
|
| DonHopkins on May 18, 2022 | root | parent | next [-]
|
| Here's a historic DECTalk Duet song from Peter Langston (which is
| actually quite lovely):
|
| Eedie & Eddie (And The Reggaebots) - Some Velvet Morning (Peter
| Langston)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0Ko1GUiSo
|
| Peter S. Langston - "Some Velvet Morning" (By Lee Hazelwood) -
| Performed By Eedie & Eddie And The Reggaebots
|
| http://www.wfmu.org/365/2003/169.shtml
|
| Eedie & Eddie On The Wire
|
| http://www.langston.com/SVM.html
|
| Peter Langston's Home Page:
|
| http://www.langston.com/
|
| His 1986 Usenix "2332" paper:
|
| http://www.langston.com/Papers/2332.pdf
|
| How to use Eddie and Eedie to make free third party long distance
| phone calls (it's OK, Bellcore had as much free long distance
| phone service as they wanted to give away for free):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22308781
|
| >My mom refused to get touch-tone service, in the hopes of
| preventing me from becoming a phone phreak. But I had my touch-
| tone-enabled friends touch-tone me MCI codes and phone numbers I
| wanted to call over the phone, and recorded them on a cassette
| tape recorder, which I could then play back, with the cassette
| player's mic and speaker cable wired directly into the phone
| speaker and mic.
|
| >Finally there was one long distance service that used speech
| recognition to dial numbers! It would repeat groups of 3 or 4
| digits you spoke, and ask you to verify they were correct with
| yes or no. If you said no, it would speak each digit back and ask
| you to verify it: Was the first number 7? ...
|
| >The most satisfying way I ever made a free phone call was at the
| expense of Bell Communications Research (who were up to their
| ears swimming in as much free phone service as they possibly
| could give away, so it didn't hurt anyone -- and it was actually
| with their explicitly spoken consent), and was due to in-band
| signaling of billing authorization:
|
| When you called (201) 644-2332, it would answer, say "Hello,"
| pause long enough to let the operator ask "Will you accept a
| collect call from Richard Nixon?", then it would say "Yes
| operator, I will accept the charges." And that worked just fine
| for third party calls too!
|
| >Peter Langston (working at Bellcore) created and wrote a classic
| 1985 Usenix paper about "Eedie & Eddie", whose phone number still
| rings a bell (in my head at least, since I called it so often):
| [...]
|
| >(201) 644-2332 or Eedie & Eddie on the Wire: An Experiment in
| Music Generation. Peter S Langston. Bell communications Research,
| Morristown, New Jersey.
|
| >ABSTRACT: At Bell Communications Research a set of programs
| running on loosely coupled Unix systems equipped with unusual
| peripherals forms a setting in which ideas about music may be
| "aired". This paper describes the hardware and software
| components of a short automated music concert that is available
| through the public switched telephone network. Three methods of
| algorithmic music generation are described.
| ValveFan6969 wrote:
| John Madden!
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I've got a DECtalk (DTC-01) I bought years ago on eBay, intending
| to use it for a speech recognition project. It was state of the
| art when it was released - Dennis Klatt's speech synthesis
| research from the lab turned into a product.
|
| What made DECTalk interesting is that it is a formant-based
| synthesizer, producing speech much like a human by taking a broad
| spectrum input voice source (cf. function of vocal cords) and
| modulating it via resonant frequencies (formants) similar to how
| we do it by changing the resonant frequencies of our vocal tract
| via articulation. When we recognize speech it's the frequency-
| tuned hairs in our inner ear acting as a filter bank and
| recognizing these resonant frequencies, which our brain has
| learnt to map back to the articulatory movements used to produce
| them.
|
| Later, cheaper, and arguably better sounding, speech synthesizers
| were based on stitching together partial recorded words
| (phonemes), which made them sound more natural but also limited
| them to speech. The DECTalk's more fundamental format-based
| generation allowed it to sing as well as talk, and the clean
| computer-generated formants made it highly intelligible (albeit
| artificial sounding) when sped up considerably, which was popular
| with the intended market of blind customers using it as a reading
| device.
|
| Daisy, daisy, give me your answer, do ...
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