Subject: Digitized Chinese Speech file on Macintosh

From: Ed Lai <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1993 07:05:20 -0800

With the release of the Macintosh speech manager there is renew
interest in text to speech software. There are also interest for the
non-English versions. However, a lot of work is needed for speech
synthesis from phoneme in any language.

And with the release of the Chinese Language Kit there will be
more interest in Chinese computing and Chinese speech.
Fortunately a special solution is possible for Chinese. There are
a limited number of sounds in Chinese. In the official dialect there
are about 1300 sounds. They are mono-syllabic and hence
relatively short, so digitized sample of all Chinese sound totals
about 15M, with 3:1 or 6:1 compression, it is down to 5M or 2.5M
which is big but is still an acceptable size. As for the text to speech
part, most Chinese character has a unique pronunciation. The Chinese
character code set has 7000/14000 characters, so it just requires a
table of 14/28K to find out the most likely pronunciation for characters
in the GB/Big5 code. So Chinese speech can be easily achieved
without the speech manager.

So Chinese text to speech is in theory easy to do by brute force.
Of course it helps if the sound files are available.

Chinese Pronunciation Tool is a HyperCard stack. It is a container for
1289 digitized Chinese sound stored as 'snd ' resources. The data are
provided by the authors of Hanzi Assistant. The file size is 5M.
These sounds represents all the sounds in the official Chinese dialect.
The stack also include the table for the pronunciation of most of the
characters used in the both the traditional and simplified Chinese
system. So the stack can be used or the purpose of Chinese
text to speech. The stack can also be used as an interactive guide
to Chinese phonetics and does not require the use of the Macintosh
Chinese system. If you wish, you may also record your own sound
using the stack and use your own voice in the Chinese speech.

The stack can be found in ftp.apple.com in the directory /pub/lai/dict,
or in ifcss.org in /software/mac/sound.

Some previously released Chinese software - the HyperCard Chinese
dictionary and the Cihui input method - can make use of these
sound resources. They can be found in the same ftp site. Another
Chinese text to speech software "Mandarin" uses a different resource
naming scheme, but there will a new version in future so that
the sound files will be compatible.

/* Disclaimer: All statments and opinions expressed are my own */
/* Edmund K. Lai                                               */
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