Cepstral Community

I have been using Cepstral for only a week and find it quite good. Here are some suggested improvements.

It would be helpful if there were different speech modes for Cepstral voices that could be activated through user selection or from text style recognition in different applications.

I am using Cepstral William with BabasChess with the text-to-voice plug in so that I can listen to FICS (free internet chess server) lectures while I watch the game play. This has been great because I am not missing moves when there is a lot of text and vice versa.

Unfortunately Cepstral have a standard text substitution - if the letter b is followed by a number it interprets the b to mean "billion". So, when a night is moved to square b5 this is read as "billion five".

Chess has a standard nomenclature. It would be helpful if there was a chess mode for Cepstral voices to interpret this nomenclature:

Nomenclature.....Cepstral Reads.....Expected Speech
Nb5...................N billion five...........Night b5
QxRa1...............Q X R A 1...............Queen takes rook on a1
dxc....................D X C....................d takes c
Qa4...................Q A 4.....................Queen A4
Ra4+.................R A 4 plus...............Rook A4 check
Ba4++...............B A 4 plus plus........Bishop A4 checkmate
O-O....................O O.......................Castle King Side
O-O-O.................O O O....................Castle Queen Side
Kc5?...................K C 5......................King C5, Huh?
a3??....................A 3.........................A3, Ouch!
a4xb5!.................A 4 X B 5................A4 takes B5, Great
Bxg7!!.................B X G 7...................Bishop takes G7, Outstanding!

The "billion five" is an example that Cepstral is already making text substitutions. If it could make different substitutions for different situations that would be great. An alternate theme to chess may be chat-room, where the standard abbreviations like

LOL (Laugh out loud),
brb (be right back),
thx (thanks),
gg (good game),
yw (you're welcome) etc.
could be interpreted.

Other standard abbreviations are already substituted e.g. Rd., Ave., Mr, Mrs, Ms, Dr etc. However in some cases the abreviation could have different meanings or Cepstral does not recognise the abreviation. It would be great if the user could select the appropriate meaning or add their own abreviations.
e.g. ST could mean "saint" or "street", as in St. John or Apple St.. Maybe you could tell the difference if the "ST" comes before or after the noun. Similarly DR could mean "Doctor" or "Drive".
e.g. BSc (Bachelor of Science), APQP (Advanced Product Quality Planning), PPAP (Pre-Production Approval Process), AAAA (Association against Acronyms and Abbreviations )

Other substitutions:

When text is written as though pluralisation is dependant upon the circumstances e.g. "Read the word(s) aloud" then this should be read as though it were plural and the brackets should be ignored. Currently Cepstral reads this as "Read the word S aloud".

When reading acronyms it would be great to be able to configure Cepstral to always read capitals of unrecognised words as individual letters or to try and say the acronym phonetically. e.g. I work with bills of materials which is abbreviated to BOM. This is always pronounced BOMB and not read as B O M.

Lastly, it would be helpful if Cepstral could emphasise text in bold (strong voice), underline (Strong voice with pause either side of the underlined text), italic (inflection) or capitals (shout) as well as sentences ending in a question mark being formed as a question.

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Here is some typical chess related text that I want read by Cepstral:
"The knight comes with tempo to the threatening square g5. Black has not much choice here, as white threatens both NxQe6 and Rxh7 mate."

"g5" is read as "grams five".

Substituting g5 with b3 causes "b3" to be read as "billion three".

If the same text (g5 or b3) is placed elsewhere it is read correctly ("G five" or "B three").

I cannot see why Cepstral treats the same phrases differently. Can I stop this automatic substitution made by Cepstral William?

Sorry for the delay in responding. We are swamped these days with 64-bit updates of all varieties, and the perfect storm of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard testing. There will be a couple of utilitarian updates before we can get to making the text processing more sensitive to context. For now, we do handle street addresses to a limited extent, although we know that there is more to be done in that area.

As for modes, we are already thinking along those lines, but the modes are so many! We can't promise anything yet, but we've just been exposed to chess as a mode, so who knows...

Hey Dragonfly.

I'll admit I don't know much about BabasChess, but for offline chess materials, you could try the approach I took.

Look at Text Processing utilities, which tend to be among the cheapest software possible, and among the most common. Once it's set up, just crank your text into "machine readable". For example, if you separate out the first letter by adding a space, you just need a special definition for about 10 letters to sound like piece names, then the squares should behave. (Except the billion one, that is funny.)

How to improve tactics and strategy at chess online, and what site could i learn strategy and tactics at chess? Please, tell the truth and what is the sercrets of the grandmasters and i want to be a world champion at chess im 10 years old.

Paulyne,

The best way to improve is to play. Join a club. Open a FICS account (Free Internet Chess Server) http://www.freechess.org/ and download one of the Apps that let you play there (Like Babas Chess http://www.babaschess.net/).

Often there are tuturials on chess tactics (enter the command Observe Lecturebot). Babas Chess has an add-on that uses TTS to speak the tutorials while you watch the game play - this is what I use my Cepstral voices for most.


Here are some other resources:
http://www.chessvideos.tv/
http://chesstempo.com/

Also, there are plenty of books out there - just search Amazon. My System by A. Nimzowitsch is pretty good. Reading the moves from the book can be a bit tedious - if you program the moves into a chess program and save them to a PGN file you can play them back and forth much easier.

Also look at Chess Master and Fritz programs which allow you to play the computer and have comprehensive tutorials.