7 ms·

Intel open sourced Stephen Hawking’s speech system

432 points by btzll 11y ago

btzll 11y ago
Github repository: https://github.com/01org/acat https://github.com/01org/acat
lorenzhs 11y ago
Discussion of a previous article, focusing on the difficulties during the development of ACAT and tailoring it towards Stephen Hawking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686757
joefreeman 11y ago
Fun fact: the latest version of this software uses SwiftKey under the hood - http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-stephen-hawkings-communication-system/ http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-... (Disclaimer: I used to work for SwiftKey)
- Nexxxeh 11y ago
  As a loyal SwiftKey on Android user, the prediction engine for SwiftKey is unnervingly good. Glad to see it's put to a better use than helping me write Facebook and HN posts. It begs the question though, why isn't there a proper SwiftKey keyboard for Windows? The OSK on 8.1 is awful compared to SwiftKey on Android. The Windows 10 is a improvement, but I'd still pay for a better one.
  - greyskull 11y ago
    Have they improved performance of SwiftKey? I had the paid version for years, was even a VIP (won a t-shirt and everything), but I switched off last year in favor of Fleksy as a faster, more lightweight alternative.
    - mtgx 11y ago
      I think the performance of Swiftkey improved about half a year ago. But I think around the same time I started noticing a significant drop in Swiftkey's accuracy. It "feels" less accurate to me than it was, although I use it with 3 enabled languages at once and I imagine that also brings lower accuracy by default. Still, I think it has become quite a bit worse than before, and I worry they did that on purpose as a compromise to improve performance.
  - balladeer 11y ago
    Was a loyal user. Then they started making themes, emojis and all those bells and whistles and thrusting it all in the app which made it really slow and bulky.
- kragen 11y ago
  Does this mean that SwiftKey is now open source, that what they've open-sourced doesn't include the actual prediction engine, or that what they've open-sourced is not the latest version? The GitHub page says they use Presage.
  - modeless 11y ago
    Interesting, since Presage is GPL 2 but this project is Apache licensed. Intel says "Integration with Presage is through the Windows Communication Framework" which I guess is a roundabout way of avoiding the GPL?
    - kragen 11y ago
      The Apache license v2 is GPL-compatible, which was actually one of the major reasons for having a v2.
      - modeless 11y ago
        Apache licensed code can be included in a GPL project, not the other way around. If the project includes any GPL code, the whole thing is GPL.
        saurik 11y ago
        I think it is better to think of it from the perspective that this code and this project is Apache, but any binaries that result from linking this code to that code are under GPL.
melling 11y ago
Does it make sense to be more aggressive in predicting by giving the user a second level from which to choose? For example, if he types 'b', then it could offer to type 'black' or 'black hole'. On the iPad, for example, if I type 'f', I get shown 'for', then if I accept, I always see 'example' and 'instance'.
- rjbwork 11y ago
  I believe there is a predictive typing keyboard based off of Tries that is floating around out there for one of the mobile OSes.
- twotwotwo 11y ago
  Suspect "sometimes, but rarely," because choosing "hole" after "black" is pretty cheap--you need your expected savings from potentially saving that choice to exceed the cost of bumping your worst option from the list. It's more likely to be practical when you can offer lots of choices rather than the typical three on mobile, though (bumping a 10th choice is cheaper than bumping a 3rd choice). Separately, predefined phrases/templates can be really practical for things related to care, food, saying hi and bye, etc. That's a special case--user likely cares more about getting it done efficiently than choosing the exact wording they want each time.
tonyedgecombe 11y ago
WinForms is still a great way to write desktop software if you don't need all the features of WPF, I just started a new project with it and have been really productive.
- jimmcslim 11y ago
  The data binding in WPF seemed more powerful to me... enabling MVVM approaches, although I'm sure the same is possible in WinForms as well. Does WinForms still get love in the new versions of the SDK or is it considered done now?
  - whoisthemachine 11y ago
    I don't know, I've done both (Silverlight MVVM and Winforms) plenty and I prefer the manual approach. Databinding is cool until you have any sort of complexity in your app, and then it becomes unwieldy quickly.
    - mariusmg 11y ago
      Databinding (and MVVM by extension) is ok only in very simple scenarios. Once you hit some complexity you end up in a world of hurt. Databinding is not a leaky abstraction ,it's a fucking flood abstraction.
      - stupidcar 11y ago
        Um, if you're using MVVM, then by definition you should have a clean separation between the properties of your Model, which is part of your domain, and the properties of your View-Model, which is part of your presentation tier and directly tied to a particular View. If you have this, what exactly can be leaked by databinding? The only things you're binding to should be properties of your View-Model.
        icegreentea 11y ago
        While that's largely true when dealing with pure business logic, there's a maddeningly large amount of UI logic, and hybrid business/UI logic that becomes really annoying (or outright impossible) to handle in pure MVVM with WPF. Reasons for this include that many user interface properties aren't exposed nicely to allow data-binding. Probably the most infamous one is that the WPF listview with multiple select enabled doesn't allow you to bind to the collection of selected items. Instead you have to do all sorts of work arounds, that while individually aren't too bad, when put all together, makes all the other hard work you put into doing MVVM on the components that you fully control super frustrating.
blackbeard 11y ago
Thinkpad love there as well. His "custom" computer appears to be an X220 tablet in an enclosure.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  Would make sense, easily available commodity hardware that is reliable and in a decently small form-factor.
nbevans 11y ago
Bear in mind this project was started around the same time there was a ton of uncertainty around the future of Silverlight and WPF. Alas, one did die, one lives on for now. But nobody knew that at the time, including Intel, or apparently Microsoft. WinForms has never faced any forward compatibility uncertainty so it is a good long-term bet.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  It's also a compelling choice if you need to operate in a resource-constrained environment. I don't know what kind of hardware is in Hawking's system nowadays, but back when this was first being built a low-power portable system that runs a higher-activity WPF UI smoothly could have been fairly expensive.
- dr_zoidberg 11y ago
  You mean Silverlight died? I've seen that said over the years, but: A) Microsoft still mantains and updates silverlight. B) It's mentioned as one of the components of Windows 10[1]. So I'm really confused here as whether Microsoft will kill it already, or keep it alive. They seem to be willing to kill it[2][3], but Netflix alone is enough reason to keep it alive. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.asp... [2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-wont-include-support-for-silverlight-in-windows-10-edge-browser/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-wont-includ... [3] http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-confirms-its-new-edge-browser-wont-support-its-silverlight-player http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-confirms-its-new-edg...
  - olavk 11y ago
    Dead can mean different things. Often it just means dead-end technology in the sense that MS does not intend to develop the technology further. Since MS have a strong focus on backwards compatibility, dead-end technologies often can keep running a very long time. VB6 for example is clearly a dead-end technology, but nobody prevents you from running and even developing VB6 apps. Silverlight has been a dead-end technology for some time, but it will continue to be supported in Internet Explorer in "legacy mode". You can still run ActiveX-controls in IE (in legacy mode), so expect to be able to run Silverlight apps for the foreseeable future.
dimman 11y ago
To everyone who's interested and programming and are thinking; what should I do/program? I'm sure there are a lot of small things or applications you can do to help other people in need. See it as a learning experience and something that might have a huge impact in other peoples life, how's that for a motivator for something to do? Kudos and respect to all people behind this project and to Stephen Hawking himself.
sagivo 11y ago
Amazon passwords: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Aaws.yml&type=Code&ref=searchresults https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Aaws.ym...
- MrBra 11y ago
  wtf
  - knd775 11y ago
    That about sums up my reaction. I feel like maybe this should be flagged for being off topic, but people seriously need to pay attention to what they commit...
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    think sagivo meant to respond to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072738
    - knd775 11y ago
      Ah, that makes a lot more sense.
almost_started 11y ago
.Net WinForms? No wonder it sounds so bad.
andersonmvd 11y ago
Now security researchers will analyze the code to find vulnerabilities to exploit Stephen Hawking's speech system. Next headline Stephen Hawing's voice sounds like Justin Bieber's voice, lol.
twotwotwo 11y ago
My mom had ALS, and used single-switch input for a while, after typing and writing on paper weren't possible. She wrote out little notes about what she was thankful for, prayers, practical messages (she had Type 1 diabetes, and told folks her insulin doses), and recipes this way. Eventually she had to switch to giving messages to a human holding a letter board by looking towards them for 'yes' and away for 'no'--cameras or Hawking's infrared-laser-based system weren't really feasible. We looked at some software called EZ Keys from a company called Words Plus. (I don't think she used it specifically, at least for long--I know she used another program, a DOS-based one called Living Better that ran in 40-col. mode that I can't anything about on the Internet.) EZ keys looked more or less like Intel's thing -- scan rows, scan items in a row, completions/predictions over at left. It even had an option to use a frequency-sorted keyboard like the Intel one, with the common letters pushed to the top left (since those are the first rows/cols to be scanned). Hawking apparently used EZ Keys, so it's possible the Intel folks intentionally gave their thing a similar interface to make the transition easy. It is worth remembering that no user cares if it's WinForms or whatever. Some folks might like a nicer voice if they haven't gotten used to theirs like Hawking ;), but the main concern is just getting the message across. Intel seems to have worked on the right stuff: better prediction (Presage http://presage.sourceforge.net/ http://presage.sourceforge.net/, which looks interesting) and context-sensitive controls. The infrared-laser-based input method sounds cool, too. This is a neat space: an optimization/prediction problem where improvements can be a significant help to someone. (There are also practical optimizations that don't have much to do with the general word-prediction problem: sometimes people have to say things about their care, food, etc., or generic 'hi' and 'bye', and it's good if those are fast.) A Web page or Chrome extension can do a lot--how close can you get to smoothly operating the Web with just the spacebar? the arrow keys and Enter? or plain old typing, but slowed down and using 0-9 for completions? I've heard that nowadays, people with communication trouble and enough movement use text-to-speech on mobile gadgets with their nifty and highly refined predictive input and that's awesome.
acqq 11y ago
Is there Hawking's speech synthesis at all (there was an article that his voice is based on some hardware device http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voice/ http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voic... )? I understand it's "just" a "navigation" system (replacing the mouse and keyboard with the facial movement virtual key). If it's so, the title (the "speech system") is misleading. The project also doesn't use SwiftKey but https://github.com/01org/acat https://github.com/01org/acat "Presage, an intelligent predictive text engine created by Matteo Vescovi."
- acqq 11y ago
  It's seems that the company which owns "Paul" voice preset and DECtalk now is SpeechFX: http://www.speechfxinc.com/dectalk.html http://www.speechfxinc.com/dectalk.html I don't know how different is that from CallText 5010 which was, as the Wired article states, eventually bought by Nuance Communications. Still, as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk "The CallText 5010 is still listed on Hawking's site as of 2015.[9]"
- voiceclonr 11y ago
  @acqq: Shameless plug. This doesn't seem to have speech. However, I've tried to build a text to speech synthesizer in www.voiceclonr.com. Appreciate if you could try and leave feedback.
  - acqq 11y ago
    If I understood correctly the open-sourced version uses as an example the Microsoft's Speech API. Searching for which I find the gems like this: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/664196/system-speech-has-a-memory-leak https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/... "System.Speech has a memory leak - by eoghanoh Status: Closed as Won't Fix" I see your work is based on http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/ http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/ Can you tell us what are your changes? Edit: I see HN already commented your work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812734
datawaslost 11y ago
Presage is great, but to clarify some other comments - it doesn't involve any specific dataset, like SwiftKey - it simply does nice smoothed predictions when given a large database of n-grams (groups of words) and their frequencies. It's fairly easy to chop up a corpus into n-grams using NLTK or other tools, and there's a good port for Python called Pressagio. My startup Spoken - http://spokenaac.com http://spokenaac.com - uses n-gram predictions to help users with aphasia or other language disorders speak. The user interface challenges aren't quite as intense as Stephen Hawking's binary input, but it's an interesting field if you're into design and big data.
nimitkalra 11y ago
The code in the GitHub repository [1] is pretty interesting to look around in. [1] https://github.com/01org/acat https://github.com/01org/acat
ris 11y ago
Forcing a disabled man to use Internet Explorer. Surely this is the basest form of cruelty.
jmpeax 11y ago
If anyone is considering downloading this to use his voice to annoy your best friend John with things like "Hello, my name is Steven Hawking. The universe is big, but not as big as John's mother.", let it be known that this software doesn't sound like Hawking.

432 points by btzll 11y ago

btzll 11y ago

Github repository: https://github.com/01org/acat https://github.com/01org/acat

Discussion of a previous article, focusing on the difficulties during the development of ACAT and tailoring it towards Stephen Hawking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8686757

joefreeman 11y ago

Fun fact: the latest version of this software uses SwiftKey under the hood - http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-stephen-hawkings-communication-system/ http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-... (Disclaimer: I used to work for SwiftKey)

Nexxxeh 11y ago
As a loyal SwiftKey on Android user, the prediction engine for SwiftKey is unnervingly good. Glad to see it's put to a better use than helping me write Facebook and HN posts. It begs the question though, why isn't there a proper SwiftKey keyboard for Windows? The OSK on 8.1 is awful compared to SwiftKey on Android. The Windows 10 is a improvement, but I'd still pay for a better one.
- greyskull 11y ago
  Have they improved performance of SwiftKey? I had the paid version for years, was even a VIP (won a t-shirt and everything), but I switched off last year in favor of Fleksy as a faster, more lightweight alternative.
  - mtgx 11y ago
    I think the performance of Swiftkey improved about half a year ago. But I think around the same time I started noticing a significant drop in Swiftkey's accuracy. It "feels" less accurate to me than it was, although I use it with 3 enabled languages at once and I imagine that also brings lower accuracy by default. Still, I think it has become quite a bit worse than before, and I worry they did that on purpose as a compromise to improve performance.
- balladeer 11y ago
  Was a loyal user. Then they started making themes, emojis and all those bells and whistles and thrusting it all in the app which made it really slow and bulky.
kragen 11y ago
Does this mean that SwiftKey is now open source, that what they've open-sourced doesn't include the actual prediction engine, or that what they've open-sourced is not the latest version? The GitHub page says they use Presage.
- modeless 11y ago
  Interesting, since Presage is GPL 2 but this project is Apache licensed. Intel says "Integration with Presage is through the Windows Communication Framework" which I guess is a roundabout way of avoiding the GPL?
  - kragen 11y ago
    The Apache license v2 is GPL-compatible, which was actually one of the major reasons for having a v2.
    - modeless 11y ago
      Apache licensed code can be included in a GPL project, not the other way around. If the project includes any GPL code, the whole thing is GPL.
      - saurik 11y ago
        I think it is better to think of it from the perspective that this code and this project is Apache, but any binaries that result from linking this code to that code are under GPL.

melling 11y ago

Does it make sense to be more aggressive in predicting by giving the user a second level from which to choose? For example, if he types 'b', then it could offer to type 'black' or 'black hole'. On the iPad, for example, if I type 'f', I get shown 'for', then if I accept, I always see 'example' and 'instance'.

rjbwork 11y ago
I believe there is a predictive typing keyboard based off of Tries that is floating around out there for one of the mobile OSes.
twotwotwo 11y ago
Suspect "sometimes, but rarely," because choosing "hole" after "black" is pretty cheap--you need your expected savings from potentially saving that choice to exceed the cost of bumping your worst option from the list. It's more likely to be practical when you can offer lots of choices rather than the typical three on mobile, though (bumping a 10th choice is cheaper than bumping a 3rd choice). Separately, predefined phrases/templates can be really practical for things related to care, food, saying hi and bye, etc. That's a special case--user likely cares more about getting it done efficiently than choosing the exact wording they want each time.

tonyedgecombe 11y ago

WinForms is still a great way to write desktop software if you don't need all the features of WPF, I just started a new project with it and have been really productive.

jimmcslim 11y ago
The data binding in WPF seemed more powerful to me... enabling MVVM approaches, although I'm sure the same is possible in WinForms as well. Does WinForms still get love in the new versions of the SDK or is it considered done now?
- whoisthemachine 11y ago
  I don't know, I've done both (Silverlight MVVM and Winforms) plenty and I prefer the manual approach. Databinding is cool until you have any sort of complexity in your app, and then it becomes unwieldy quickly.
  - mariusmg 11y ago
    Databinding (and MVVM by extension) is ok only in very simple scenarios. Once you hit some complexity you end up in a world of hurt. Databinding is not a leaky abstraction ,it's a fucking flood abstraction.
    - stupidcar 11y ago
      Um, if you're using MVVM, then by definition you should have a clean separation between the properties of your Model, which is part of your domain, and the properties of your View-Model, which is part of your presentation tier and directly tied to a particular View. If you have this, what exactly can be leaked by databinding? The only things you're binding to should be properties of your View-Model.
      - icegreentea 11y ago
        While that's largely true when dealing with pure business logic, there's a maddeningly large amount of UI logic, and hybrid business/UI logic that becomes really annoying (or outright impossible) to handle in pure MVVM with WPF. Reasons for this include that many user interface properties aren't exposed nicely to allow data-binding. Probably the most infamous one is that the WPF listview with multiple select enabled doesn't allow you to bind to the collection of selected items. Instead you have to do all sorts of work arounds, that while individually aren't too bad, when put all together, makes all the other hard work you put into doing MVVM on the components that you fully control super frustrating.

blackbeard 11y ago

Thinkpad love there as well. His "custom" computer appears to be an X220 tablet in an enclosure.

noir_lord 11y ago
Would make sense, easily available commodity hardware that is reliable and in a decently small form-factor.

nbevans 11y ago

Bear in mind this project was started around the same time there was a ton of uncertainty around the future of Silverlight and WPF. Alas, one did die, one lives on for now. But nobody knew that at the time, including Intel, or apparently Microsoft. WinForms has never faced any forward compatibility uncertainty so it is a good long-term bet.

bunderbunder 11y ago
It's also a compelling choice if you need to operate in a resource-constrained environment. I don't know what kind of hardware is in Hawking's system nowadays, but back when this was first being built a low-power portable system that runs a higher-activity WPF UI smoothly could have been fairly expensive.
dr_zoidberg 11y ago
You mean Silverlight died? I've seen that said over the years, but: A) Microsoft still mantains and updates silverlight. B) It's mentioned as one of the components of Windows 10[1]. So I'm really confused here as whether Microsoft will kill it already, or keep it alive. They seem to be willing to kill it[2][3], but Netflix alone is enough reason to keep it alive. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.aspx https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.asp... [2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-wont-include-support-for-silverlight-in-windows-10-edge-browser/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-wont-includ... [3] http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-confirms-its-new-edge-browser-wont-support-its-silverlight-player http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-confirms-its-new-edg...
- olavk 11y ago
  Dead can mean different things. Often it just means dead-end technology in the sense that MS does not intend to develop the technology further. Since MS have a strong focus on backwards compatibility, dead-end technologies often can keep running a very long time. VB6 for example is clearly a dead-end technology, but nobody prevents you from running and even developing VB6 apps. Silverlight has been a dead-end technology for some time, but it will continue to be supported in Internet Explorer in "legacy mode". You can still run ActiveX-controls in IE (in legacy mode), so expect to be able to run Silverlight apps for the foreseeable future.

dimman 11y ago

To everyone who's interested and programming and are thinking; what should I do/program? I'm sure there are a lot of small things or applications you can do to help other people in need. See it as a learning experience and something that might have a huge impact in other peoples life, how's that for a motivator for something to do? Kudos and respect to all people behind this project and to Stephen Hawking himself.

sagivo 11y ago

Amazon passwords: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Aaws.yml&type=Code&ref=searchresults https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Aaws.ym...

MrBra 11y ago
wtf
- knd775 11y ago
  That about sums up my reaction. I feel like maybe this should be flagged for being off topic, but people seriously need to pay attention to what they commit...
- bdcravens 11y ago
  think sagivo meant to respond to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072738
  - knd775 11y ago
    Ah, that makes a lot more sense.

almost_started 11y ago

.Net WinForms? No wonder it sounds so bad.

andersonmvd 11y ago

Now security researchers will analyze the code to find vulnerabilities to exploit Stephen Hawking's speech system. Next headline Stephen Hawing's voice sounds like Justin Bieber's voice, lol.

twotwotwo 11y ago

My mom had ALS, and used single-switch input for a while, after typing and writing on paper weren't possible. She wrote out little notes about what she was thankful for, prayers, practical messages (she had Type 1 diabetes, and told folks her insulin doses), and recipes this way. Eventually she had to switch to giving messages to a human holding a letter board by looking towards them for 'yes' and away for 'no'--cameras or Hawking's infrared-laser-based system weren't really feasible. We looked at some software called EZ Keys from a company called Words Plus. (I don't think she used it specifically, at least for long--I know she used another program, a DOS-based one called Living Better that ran in 40-col. mode that I can't anything about on the Internet.) EZ keys looked more or less like Intel's thing -- scan rows, scan items in a row, completions/predictions over at left. It even had an option to use a frequency-sorted keyboard like the Intel one, with the common letters pushed to the top left (since those are the first rows/cols to be scanned). Hawking apparently used EZ Keys, so it's possible the Intel folks intentionally gave their thing a similar interface to make the transition easy. It is worth remembering that no user cares if it's WinForms or whatever. Some folks might like a nicer voice if they haven't gotten used to theirs like Hawking ;), but the main concern is just getting the message across. Intel seems to have worked on the right stuff: better prediction (Presage http://presage.sourceforge.net/ http://presage.sourceforge.net/, which looks interesting) and context-sensitive controls. The infrared-laser-based input method sounds cool, too. This is a neat space: an optimization/prediction problem where improvements can be a significant help to someone. (There are also practical optimizations that don't have much to do with the general word-prediction problem: sometimes people have to say things about their care, food, etc., or generic 'hi' and 'bye', and it's good if those are fast.) A Web page or Chrome extension can do a lot--how close can you get to smoothly operating the Web with just the spacebar? the arrow keys and Enter? or plain old typing, but slowed down and using 0-9 for completions? I've heard that nowadays, people with communication trouble and enough movement use text-to-speech on mobile gadgets with their nifty and highly refined predictive input and that's awesome.

acqq 11y ago

Is there Hawking's speech synthesis at all (there was an article that his voice is based on some hardware device http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voice/ http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voic... )? I understand it's "just" a "navigation" system (replacing the mouse and keyboard with the facial movement virtual key). If it's so, the title (the "speech system") is misleading. The project also doesn't use SwiftKey but https://github.com/01org/acat https://github.com/01org/acat "Presage, an intelligent predictive text engine created by Matteo Vescovi."

acqq 11y ago
It's seems that the company which owns "Paul" voice preset and DECtalk now is SpeechFX: http://www.speechfxinc.com/dectalk.html http://www.speechfxinc.com/dectalk.html I don't know how different is that from CallText 5010 which was, as the Wired article states, eventually bought by Nuance Communications. Still, as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk "The CallText 5010 is still listed on Hawking's site as of 2015.[9]"
voiceclonr 11y ago
@acqq: Shameless plug. This doesn't seem to have speech. However, I've tried to build a text to speech synthesizer in www.voiceclonr.com. Appreciate if you could try and leave feedback.
- acqq 11y ago
  If I understood correctly the open-sourced version uses as an example the Microsoft's Speech API. Searching for which I find the gems like this: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/664196/system-speech-has-a-memory-leak https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/... "System.Speech has a memory leak - by eoghanoh Status: Closed as Won't Fix" I see your work is based on http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/ http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/ Can you tell us what are your changes? Edit: I see HN already commented your work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812734

datawaslost 11y ago

Presage is great, but to clarify some other comments - it doesn't involve any specific dataset, like SwiftKey - it simply does nice smoothed predictions when given a large database of n-grams (groups of words) and their frequencies. It's fairly easy to chop up a corpus into n-grams using NLTK or other tools, and there's a good port for Python called Pressagio. My startup Spoken - http://spokenaac.com http://spokenaac.com - uses n-gram predictions to help users with aphasia or other language disorders speak. The user interface challenges aren't quite as intense as Stephen Hawking's binary input, but it's an interesting field if you're into design and big data.

nimitkalra 11y ago

The code in the GitHub repository [1] is pretty interesting to look around in. [1] https://github.com/01org/acat https://github.com/01org/acat

ris 11y ago

Forcing a disabled man to use Internet Explorer. Surely this is the basest form of cruelty.

jmpeax 11y ago

If anyone is considering downloading this to use his voice to annoy your best friend John with things like "Hello, my name is Steven Hawking. The universe is big, but not as big as John's mother.", let it be known that this software doesn't sound like Hawking.