audio preview

[randy (imported)]

can we have an audio preview feature like youtube has? it is fun to listen to a computer say your message and people can tell when they mis spoke but didnt necessarily mis spell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWYTyfQe-o8

check out youtube's feature here. click post comment then write your comment then click audio preview.

i have a crush on the girl at 1:30.

[fhunter]

can we have an audio preview feature like youtube has? it is fun to listen to a computer say your message and people can tell when they mis spoke but didnt necessarily mis spell.

Voice synthesisys (have I spelled correctly?) takes lot's of cpu power (or results have such awfull quality, that it is unintelligible).

All of this - IMHO. I had hands-on experience with this - once tried to make a script which read email/weather. I tried festival (may be other engines had lesser requriements, but this one was free) - results were in:

1. too much processing power required.

2. was unable to tune it correctly - so to sound pleasantly.

3. Haven't found good female voice-file for russian language.

So I dropped the project.

Returning to this site - I can see 2 problems (may be more):

1. CPU time. - the one required to synthesize voice.

2. Bandwidth. - reason here same as for not hosting pictures - it is not cheap.

5 minutes mp3 (56kbit/s, mono) - 2Mb. - it's 300 seconds. About a 1 word per second = 300 words. let's say 5-7 letters per word = about 1500-2100 bytes of text not counting punctuation and whitespaces.

Hmm... some inefficiency here: 3k vs 2Mb.... To me it's too much.

PS. Joke from xkcd.com went a loong way (http://xkcd.com/481/)

[Paolo]

Thank you, FHunter, for explaining that the way you did.

I have 512 DSL (allegedly) and for me, the Archive is always painfully SLOW. I can download a 2MB chunk of a movie off of the Usenet in the time it takes VBulletin to load the main index page.

So to answer the question, in a word - NO!

Discussion over.