Shortcomings
The synthesized voice created by using a voice font tends to have a slightly unnatural tone. Human voices are very prone to change with the speaker's mood and several other factors that aren't programmed into computerized voices. Voice font software on the Macintosh system tries to get around this by providing tags to change some components of the voice, such as pitch. The Natural Voices software in the sources section allows defining acronym pronunciation and speech rate, as well as other things. Even though speech synthesis has existed since around 1930, according to that source, and the Speech synthesis article, it is difficult to fool experienced listeners into believing that the voice is indeed human.
This may be similar to the difficulty in achieving true Artificial Intelligence that can actually pass a Turing Test by presenting spectators with something indistinguishable from what it is trying to simulate.
Read more about this topic: Voice Font
Famous quotes containing the word shortcomings:
“I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart’s history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“My mother and father are the only people on the whole planet for whom I will never begrudge a thing. Should I achieve great things, it is the work of their hands; they are splendid people and their absolute love of their children places them above the highest praise. It cloaks all of their shortcomings, shortcomings that may have resulted from a difficult life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)