[Coco] [Color Computer] Voice Simulator

[Roger Taylor]

At 01:14 PM 1/3/2007, you wrote:
>I remember seeing an ad in Hot CoCo many years ago that featured a voice
>simulator, sort of an artificial intelligence program.  I am wondering
>if anyone here remembers that ad, and that product, and whether anyone
>here actually had or has it.  I'm curious to know how well this worked,
>twenty years ago.



I also wrote a speech program for the CoCo called CVOX.  It preloads 
about 48 or so phonemes into memory and you build your words and 
sentences by joining the right speech parts together in an ASCII 
string like "R-AH-J-R" for "Roger", or "H-EH-L-OH" for "Hello".

I think the last version added delays and pitch control.  The goal 
for CVOX never happened but I was working on it when I was married, 
with my wife's clear voice for the speech you heard.  I think we 
recorded some 10 or so phonemes perfectly so they join with other 
ones kinda seamlessly, but she got frustrated with how many takes it 
was taking to get it right and the project was put on 
"hold".  :)  That version of CVOX was also going to be 
background-driven from Disk BASIC where you send the speech commands 
to a simulated hardware port much like how the SSC Pak works, and 
waited on the speech to arrive.  I did some testing in that area and 
it worked well most of the time considering how many BASIC programs 
were compatible or not.

This leads to another topic... real-time speech and sound is very 
possible with the CoCo 3 using the GIME interrupt system.  That's 
right, totally background-driven music and audio blasts like sound 
effects and so forth.  Many games probably already use the 
concept.  My old Spider-Hype games have 4-channel background music 
which are actually MUSICA 2 files being played by the IRQ and FIRQ 
interrupt routines, with IRQ keeping time and FIRQ doing the PCM 
pumping.  The same idea can be applied to generating speech in the 
background of a CoCo game or program.






-- 
Roger Taylor