NeoSpeech Support

[daniel]

Are you guys getting any sort of response from NeoSpeech? Its a nice tts engine, but its really buggy. The random slowdowns, where paul will read a random sentence at -10 are really driving me bananas, especially since I've become so accustomed to using that voice. However, if NeoSpeech are being totally non-responsive, then perhaps I should kill their engines, and go back to ATT -- and if so, the sooner the better. So, are you guys getting any real signs of support from NeoSpeech? Are we going to see an upgrade anytime soon? Will it turn out to be a waste of time in the end?

I love text aloud , and I want to love neospeech , but it's hard .

Thanks

[kdwhite]

My impression is that engine updates from almost all of the voices companies is going to be few and far between, so we'll just have to work towards workarounds anytime possible.

[jnuttallphd]

Hello Daniel and Ken:

I find the Neospeech voices both Kate and Paul to be very reliable. I think probably the slowdown problem you are experiencing must be idiosyncratic to your system.

The one thing I do find with the Neospeech voices (Paul) is that sometimes the tts drops off the last word in a sentence. Missing one out of 1000 words doesn't seem to slow my comprehension down any but it is a slight nuisance. Has anyone else complained about this situation.

Jim -- Michigan

[SFCurley]

What I'm about to say is not related directly to the NeoSpeech support issue, but more specifically to the issue of the random slowdown. I never listen to TA directly. I always convert to MP3 files and then listen to files on my MP3 player. As others have pointed out already, the random slowdown problem does not occur in this scenario, so one option is to convert to MP3 and then listen to the text through whatever your pc-based audio player is.

Assuming, though, that this solution would not be acceptable, here's another potential solution. I, too, have noticed several buggy things in the NeoSpeech voices (e.g., words not being read when they occur after a hyphenated combination, and several others). For every problem I have encountered, I have been able to workaround the problem using the pronounciation editor, usually in combination with some regular expression and an alternative substitution pronounciation for the problem word or word combination.

So, for example, if the random pause only occurs for periods, and not colons, then use the pronounciation editor to replace the pronounciation of periods with colons (or with {{pause=0.1}} commands, or maybe with three commas instead of one period.) Again, I've been able to come up with workarounds for every NeoSpeech problem I care about, and I think there's a good chance you might find something that will work for this one, too.

[SFCurley]

Jim,

I too noticed that occassional missing word but developed a pronounciation editor workaround to fix. In my experience, it was always the word at the end of a sentence after a hyphenated word-pair. (e.e., "a high-quality bond." might yield either quality or bond being dropped as I recall).

My workaround was entering this in the pronounciation editor.

Word: {{re=\W(\w+)-(\w+)}} Pronounciation: $1 <s> $2

I think this fixed it for me. I NEVER have the problem anymore. If this doesn't fix it, post an example of the problem and I bet I can come up with a workaround.

--Sean

[daniel]

Jim: its idosyncratic all right ...

Even with save to file paul will slow down.

Sean, you better be careful ... if you keep using neospeech you'll have to quit your current job and become a perl programmer .

Its a shame to waste so much time working around stuff. For example, back in the TextAloud 1.4 days, I had all kinds of perl and emacs lisp scripts, with file splitting and regular expression subs all over the shop. Then these NextUpStarts release 2.0, and all I can do rm -rf * on all my lovely scripts, because the file splitter, batch converter, and regex sub in text aloud all work so wonderfully . Thanks Ken! These features work really well.

Anyways, like I said, i am trying to love neo-speech. Ken, perhaps you might pass on my/our mixed feelings to neo-speech. There is a big difference between nextup and neospeech. nextup gives us regexp to work around problems in the (neospeech) speech engines, while neospeech does what? ignores us? I think NextUp makes NeoSpeech look pretty bad. I hope the reverse does not happen. Not everyone will realize that Ken is not responsible for Paul.

[kdwhite]

Don't be too quick to blame neospeech on this stuff. I think we are just going to find this is a way of life. This consumer business is really small $$'s for any of the speech companies. They only make real money on biz stuff like Call Centers. Anytime they will even license the stuff for PC usage it is half out of the goodness of their hearts, half out of maybe building a reputation, but none of them are making enough money off of the consumer side (with possible exception of ScanSoft) to pay for the costs. We'll hopefully in the next few months have some Babel voices that are pretty good. In this case, we will even be another level removed from the developers (licensing through a 3rd party) so it will be a case where what we get is what we get, period.

[jnuttallphd]

Hello Sean:

Your programing suggestion is great. How do I put into the pronunciation editor?
The pronunciation editor asked for a word and then asks for the pronunciation. I would love the use your suggestion, just need to know how to implement.

Jim -- Michigan
Dictated with voice recognition software.

[SFCurley]

Hi Jim,

After opening the pronounciation editor, just click on "new" and then enter (or copy/paste) this string {{re=\W(\w+)-(\w+)}} -- including the brackets -- into the Word field.

Then enter this string $1 <s> $2 (can also enter just $1 $2 with a space between) into the pronounciation field.

It should work right away, but I have found, in some cases with the regular expressions, that I have to shut down TA and re-start after I enter.

Let me know if this works for you . . . if not, post an example of a sentence with an unpronounced word and I'll see if I can concoct a fix for that.

--Sean

[jnuttallphd]

Thanks Sean:

Your programming fix for the dropped words worked really great. If I run into other problems I will let you know. Glad to know their people with this kind of knowledge around ready to help.

Jim -- Michigan

[SFCurley]

Jim, Happy to help and glad it worked.

--Sean

[mannytc]

Sean,

I posted a problem in the voices forum (http://www.nextup.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=653) about not being able to run the pronunciation editor program for my Neospeech voices I purchased through NextUp. I get error messages saying some debug DLLs are missing and it won't run. I saw some other posts relating to the same problem but with no resolution. Since you have it running I was wondering if there was anything special you needed to do. Also assuming I get it running where do I find information about the programming options available.

Thanks

[SFCurley]

Well, there's the NeoSpeech dictionary editor, and then there's the TA basic pronounciation editor, as well as the TA Advanced Pronounciation edtor. I, too, am unable to run the NeoSpeech dictionary editor for the reasons sited in the other post you referenced. For some reason, NeoSpeech's engine doesn't support the TA Advanced Pronounciation editor -- you can enter and test things into the TA Advanced Pronounciation editor, but NeoSpeech won't look at it for pronounciatin guidance.

However, NeoSpeech does use the TA Basic Pronounciation editor, so that's what I'm doing. Anything I don't like as far as how NeoSpeech voices pronounce, I just enter an overriding pronounciation into the Basic TA Pronounciation Editor and that works fine. It's especially useful given TA's new support of regular expressions . . . so, that's what I'm doing. Hope that helps.

[mannytc]

Ok, I understand now. I misunderstood and thought you were getting into the Neospeech dictionary editor. I need to get that going since I am trying to use the voices with another app that doesn't have the pronunciation editor functions that TA does. If you ever find out how to get the other one running please share that info.

Thanks

[SFCurley]

Will do.

[bjsafdie]

Anyone else notice some stupid artifacts left in by the NeoSpeech folks?

Bring up Kate16 and Type in: charlie
and hit Speak. You will hear: he is busy

Type in: Charlie
and you will hear: he is not busy

qtest = "test test"

buahahahaha!


--BJ Safdie

P.S. I am working on an editor for us. FYI, there ARE phonetic entries in the NeoSpeech UserDict. Think we can get a list? They do not need to be entered into a different file, so one editor could handle both types of entries.

[SFCurley]

Confirmed the "qtest", but Charlie and charlie both pronounced correctly for me.

Out of curiosity, what kind of editor are you working on? This would be a program to replace the userdict.exe that's not working?

[kdwhite]

I think I had pulled the Charlie thing out when I pulled out the beeps. For anyone that didn't get it,

I edited the file of all the beeps. You can download it at
http://www.nextup.com/files/user_eng.dict

SAve this in
C:\Program Files\NeoSpeech\Kate16\data-common\userdict
overwriting the existing user_eng.dict file.

You'll also want to save it in the other neospeech voice dirs, for example Paul16. It seems to load only the one from whichever voice you use first, and then uses that one for all the voices.

REboot after saving, then all should work normal.

[mannytc]

FYI for you guys. I got the userengdic.exe working finally on my system. See this thread for the info: http://www.nextup.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1977#1977

[bjsafdie]

SFCurly,

Yeah, this will ba a standalone editor. It should not be too hard, but I have done a lot more ASP.NET than WinForms. If I get frustrated along the way, I will probably punt.

--BJ Safdie

[bjsafdie]

Well, I'll be! Thanks Manny! I had tried a few Downloads and even went to MSDN and downloaded the original Visual Studio 97. I always got that darn ordinal 5077 message.

This is MUCH better than the piddly thing I was planning. THANKS!

--BJ Safdie

[SFCurley]

You know, I went hunting for the missing dlls a few months back and found them, but didn't have the doo-dads to try them for fear of virus/corruption. Since you're computer hasn't blown up I'll give it a try . . . worst case, I spend Labor Day weekend re-installying my OS!

[SFCurley]

Miracle of miracles, it worked. . . thanks much, Manny. . . great job!