Looking back, I realize how prophetic that was. After the Intel team introduced themselves, Haussecker took the lead, explaining why they were there and what their plans were.
Haussecker continued speaking for 20 minutes, when, suddenly, Hawking spoke. It took him 20 minutes to write a salutation of about 30 words. It stopped us all in our tracks. It was poignant. We now realized that this was going to be a much bigger problem than we thought. At the time, Hawking's computer interface was a program called EZ Keys, an upgrade from the previous softwares and also designed by Words Plus.
It provided him with a keyboard on the screen and a basic word-prediction algorithm. A cursor automatically scanned across the keyboard by row or by column and he could select a character by moving his cheek to stop the cursor. EZ Keys also allowed Hawking to control the mouse in Windows and operate other applications in his computer. He surfed the web with Firefox and wrote his lectures using Notepad. He also had a webcam that he used with Skype.
The Intel team envisaged an upheaval of Hawking's archaic system, which would involve introducing new hardware. Gaze tracking couldn't lock on to Hawking's gaze, because of the drooping of his eyelids. Before the Intel project, Hawking had tested EEG caps that could read his brainwaves and potentially transmit commands to his computer.
Somehow, they couldn't get a strong enough brain signal. They weren't able to get a strong enough signal-to-noise. After returning to Intel Labs and after months of research, Denman prepared a minute video to send to Hawking, delineating which new user-interface prototypes they wanted to implement and soliciting his feedback.
The changes included additions such as a "back button," which Hawking could use not only to delete characters but to navigate a step back in his user interface; a predictive-word algorithm; and next-word navigation, which would let him choose words one after another rather than typing them.
The main change, in Denman's view, was a prototype that tackled the biggest problem that Hawking had with his user interface: missed key-hits. It was unbearably slow and he would get frustrated. He's not somebody who just wants to get the gist of the message across. He's somebody who really wants it to be perfect.
To address the missed key-hits, the Intel team added a prototype that would interpret Hawking's intentions, rather than his actual input, using an algorithm similar to that used in word processing and mobile phones. The problem is that it takes a little time to get used to and you have to release control to let the system do the work.
The addition of this feature could increase your speed and let you concentrate on content. The video concluded: "What's your level of excitement or apprehension? They implemented the new user interface on Hawking's computer. Denman thought they were on the right path. By September, they began to get feedback: Hawking wasn't adapting to the new system. It was too complicated.
Related subjects: Software Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer , and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech TTS system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database.
Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output.
Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice, and by its ability to be understood.
An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written works on a home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early s. Overview of text processing A text-to-speech system or "engine" is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks.
First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization , pre-processing , or tokenization. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences.
The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer —then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. History Mechanical devices Long before electronic signal processing was invented, speech researchers tried to build machines to create human speech.
Early examples of "speaking heads" were made by Gerbert of Aurillac d. This was followed by the bellows-operated "acoustic-mechanical speech machine" by Wolfgang von Kempelen of Vienna , Austria , described in a paper. This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels.
In , Charles Wheatstone produced a "speaking machine" based on von Kempelen's design, and in , M. Faber built the "Euphonia". Wheatstone's design was resurrected in by Paget. The Pattern playback was built by Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories in the late s and completed in There were several different versions of this hardware device but only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound.
Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues were able to discover acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments consonants and vowels. Early electronic speech synthesizers sounded robotic and were often barely intelligible.
However, the quality of synthesized speech has steadily improved, and output from contemporary speech synthesis systems is sometimes indistinguishable from actual human speech.
Electronic devices The first computer-based speech synthesis systems were created in the late s, and the first complete text-to-speech system was completed in Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song " Daisy Bell", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews.
Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel A Space Odyssey , where the HAL computer sings the same song as it is being put to sleep by astronaut Dave Bowman. Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research is still being conducted into mechanical speech synthesizers for use in humanoid robots.
Even a perfect electronic synthesizer is limited by the quality of the transducer usually a loudspeaker that produces the sound, so, in a robot, a mechanical system may be able to produce a more natural sound than a small loudspeaker.
Synthesizer technologies The most important qualities of a speech synthesis system are naturalness and intelligibility. Naturalness describes how closely the output sounds like human speech, while intelligibility is the ease with which the output is understood. The ideal speech synthesizer is both natural and intelligible and most speech synthesis systems try to maximize both characteristics. The two primary technologies for generating synthetic speech waveforms are concatenative synthesis and formant synthesis.
Each technology has strengths and weaknesses, and the intended uses of a synthesis system will typically determine which approach is used. Concatenative synthesis Concatenative synthesis is based on the concatenation or stringing together of segments of recorded speech.
Generally, concatenative synthesis produces the most natural-sounding synthesized speech. A text-to-speech TTS system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. Long before electronic signal processing was invented, there were those who tried to build machines to create human speech. In , the Danish scientist Christian Kratzenstein, working at the Russian Academy of Sciences, built models of the human vocal tract that could produce the five long vowel sounds in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, they are [a], [e], [i], [o] and [u].
This was followed by the bellows-operated ""acoustic-mechanical speech machine"" by Wolfgang von Kempelen of Pressburg, Hungary, described in a paper. This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels.
In , Charles Wheatstone produced a ""speaking machine"" based on von Kempelen's design, and in , M. Faber built the ""Euphonia"". Wheatstone's design was resurrected in by Paget.
In the s, Bell Labs developed the vocoder, which automatically analyzed speech into its fundamental tone and resonances. The Pattern playback was built by Dr. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories in the late s and completed in There were several different versions of this hardware device but only one currently survives.
The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues were able to discover acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments consonants and vowels.
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