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For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the new s
by leonroy 18y ago
For the techies here: At first I was wondering how the hell they fit a text to speech engine in that little package - but in the vid they explain that the new shuffle's VoiceOver feature uses a different voice for windows and mac. Ahhhh. So it seems that they must be getting the OS to do the text to speech, store the output as little audio files alongside each track/playlist and then play them back when the user requests it.
Typical Apple - simple, clever solution to a seemingly complex problem.
- jonursenbach 18y agoSo they're using up more space on what's already terribly limited. Incredible!
- jws 18y ago2 seconds of song title information in a 200 second song. Irrelevant!
- electromagnetic 18y agoConvert it to AAC and you'll double the storage space of the Shuffle. Their estimates are based on MP3 and I know from experience that AAC can store a song with equal quality (well the same output quality from an earphone).
- raganwald 18y agoYou're in a chair flying in the sky and you're bitching about not getting Internet Access! Sorry, that was a poor attempt at a witty put-down. Let's start again. There is a fixed amount of space. true, 4GB seems like plenty, but so did 640K once upon a time. But the question here is whether 4GB of music and voice cues in a very small form factor is more valuable than 4GB of music only in the small form factor or 4GB of music in a larger form factor with a screen to display visual cues. It's all a question of turning the design knobs to produce the overall highest value/best experience.
- electromagnetic 18y agoFor a $80 device, they're not going to put in an entire text->voice program capable of on-the-fly translations. It's insane to think they'll stick a 500mhz processor into an $80 device that's smaller than my thumb and it still have enough power to actually be usable. This is an amazing solution to a complex problem, and with the quality of voice from these programs it's likely understandable at a very low bitrate. Using AAC my 2gb Sony Walkman held more songs than my wifes 4gb iPod nano, now on my iPod I often use AAC simply to increase the storage capacity. I have little doubt you could get a fully understandable output at maybe a hundred kb in AAC.
- 10ren 18y agoGenerating speech from text is not very difficult (parsing speech to text is the hard one). You string phonemes together with some sequence rules. e.g. ET's "phone home" on Speak & Spell did it with 80's consumer technology. The branding of PC vs. Mac voice could be done independently of whether generation is done on the iPod or in iTunes.
- blackguardx 18y agoIf they used a custom chip, I bet they could fit a text-to-speech engine in less chip space than the flash required to store the prerecorded audio of the track information.
- wmf 18y agoSure, they could fit a crappy TTS engine on a chip, but Alex (what Apple is using) is 670MB. I suspect a 4GB Shuffle has significantly less than 670MB worth of voice clips in it. http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/voices/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/voices/ http://gannett-hscp.blogspot.com/2008/03/biggest-file-in-leopard-alexs-voice.html http://gannett-hscp.blogspot.com/2008/03/biggest-file-in-leo...
- tvon 18y agoFYI, you need to sync from Leopard to get Alex on the shuffle, both Tiger and Windows use a lower quality voice (so says Daring Fireball).
- 10ren 18y agoyep, looks like the OP was right after all: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/03/11/ipod-shuffle-voiceover http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/03/11/ipod-shuffle-voi... Alex takes up 18% of Leopard.
- blackguardx 18y agoThe voice from that link doesn't sound that much better than the text-to-speech engine that came with my 16-bit soundblaster sound card in 1992. It certainly didn't take up 670 Mb. Sure Alex is better, but it apparently takes orders of magnitude of complexity to get just a small improvement.