27 December 2023, 11:20 | #21 |
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Again, in case this wasn't clear: "narrator" is not abandoned. Softvoice exists as private entity, and their product exists, and you can buy it. You can even buy the narrator.device sources if you want to, except that - if you ask me - their price does not match its value. Narrator was a nice toy, but is not a necessity.
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27 December 2023, 11:45 | #22 | |
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27 December 2023, 12:02 | #23 | |
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A clean room reimplementation of the original might be a fair compromise but I don't know how people feel about that. |
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27 December 2023, 14:15 | #24 | |
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The reason why reverse-engineering is legal is that the interest of the public to have access to products and services of best quality and lowest price, i.e. to have competition in the marketplace, overweighs the individuals' or companies' interest in their intellectual property. |
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27 December 2023, 14:43 | #25 |
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So you call "copyright law" an "exception"? Interesting. The narrator.device is copyrighted, and its source code headers say so.
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27 December 2023, 15:11 | #26 | |
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Copyright protection does not mean you can't reverse-engineer and learn about the inner workings of a piece of software. It means you can't derive work from copyrighted work without the copyright holder's permission. That is what a "cleanroom implementation" usually refers to: reverse-engineer to learn how something works and then use that knowledge to make your own implementation. That's perfectly legal. |
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27 December 2023, 19:00 | #27 |
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I looked at reverse engineering this many years ago, and also looked at all the alternative software projects Linux or otherwise. There were some good options. I wish I had my notes. I just wanted something lightweight that could do English voices and this was that.
Nowadays, we can also look to the "AI" to generate voices and even translate between languages. That's another option. This thread is kind of a moot point. Someone who does not care about copyright might go ahead and do whatever they want. Those who do, might avoid using whatever is made or may never even see it :-) |
27 December 2023, 22:51 | #28 | |||
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Let's get real here. SoftVoice have effectively abandoned the Amiga. If they thought they could make any money out of it they would either continue to support the platform directly or license the source code at an attractive price. But they didn't, which means they think it's (currently) worthless. But if people start making a fuss about reverse-engineering it even if we have the law on our side it could attract unwelcome attention from their lawyers. Nobody wants to be at the wrong end of a DCMA take-down notice or lawsuit - valid or not. So let's not talk seriously about resourcing code or publishing intimate details of how the device works, since that is the kind of thing they would jump on. Instead we will cower in the shadows hoping nobody notices what we are doing and spoils the fun. The way these outfits come out of the woodwork to pick over the Amiga's bleached bones looking for something to monetize is disgusting. Sometimes I wish it had really died with Commodore, and all the assets made free like some other retro platforms have. If I was a billionaire I would make that happen. But since I am only a poor pensioner I will just have to continue the Amiga tradition of hacking code while ignoring the dire treats from legal eagles. Like Mr Robot, I hack everything - and there's nothing you can do about it! |
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27 December 2023, 23:55 | #29 | ||||||||||||
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28 December 2023, 16:56 | #30 | |
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28 December 2023, 19:02 | #31 |
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28 December 2023, 19:17 | #32 |
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Did Steven Hawking use the narrator.device on the Amiga? Hardly. I'm talking about the usefulness of the narrator.device (and that implies the Amiga) - and which serious applications had it found? Like, for example, is it integrated into the Os? The console maybe? For blind people maybe? No.
This *IS* a toy - it was used (as on the Mac) as a tech-demo for the Amiga. Anyhow, if you want to help to improve the situation and consider it important, either start collecting money to buy a license from Softvoice, or start porting another text to speech engine. |
30 December 2023, 03:35 | #33 | |
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30 December 2023, 07:38 | #34 |
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How much software bangs original content into narrator.device? A *lot* of it used translator.device. You could probably write a translator.device equivalent that spits out phonemes that are completely incompatible with the AmigaOS narrator.device and instead have your own narrator.device replacement that understands them and just pipes them into some other TTS engine, completely obviating the need for reverse engineering narrator.device.
Then you could have a fallback mode for narrator.device for any software that speaks phonemes directly, and just does a half-assed job of interpreting the phonemes. You could figure out a good phoneme table pretty quickly just by capturing output from translator.device and then feeding it into narrator.device and sampling the output, then deciding what each phoneme sounds like, until you have all the phonemes mapped. No disassembly of narrator.device required. |
30 December 2023, 12:23 | #35 |
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There's a bunch of open source TTS engines, some of them rather old and originally targeted at slow hardware in the same performance bracket as a =>030 Amiga (Mbrola was for VAX, eSpeak RISCOS ARM2/3).
If you really really would genuinely want this, building a shim layer on top of one of those that replicates the translator or narrator library interfaces shouldn't even be that hard (okay, famous last words). SoftVoice has a website with samples up and even their latest version of the software sounds like generic 80's robo-voice, so you aren't going to be missing much with an alternative implementation. I kind of wonder if the Softvoice guy has had any sales of his product in years, maybe he tries to target licensees needing TTS on super low power/performance platforms but even there it'd be a hard pill to swallow if we are talking such big license fees. ...But that's neither here or there. I think the fact nobody has done this after more than 25 years might give a hint at how much weight this feature actually carries. |
30 December 2023, 13:14 | #36 |
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There's some documentation on the phonemes here:
https://archive.org/details/Amiga_BA.../n298/mode/1up |
30 December 2023, 13:28 | #37 |
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As some here may know, I maintain a BASIC interpreter. One thing I would love to add is a SAY command - and a detailed description of the algorithms employed, how the sound is generated etc etc so that I can do that would be amazing, especially if it sounds authentically like an Amiga.
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30 December 2023, 15:43 | #38 | |
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SoftVoice supporting Spanish makes good sense. Counted by the number of native speakers, Spanish is in the second place, after Chinese. English is in the third place. |
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30 December 2023, 16:23 | #39 | |
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30 December 2023, 18:53 | #40 | |
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http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/translator42 http://aminet.net/package/dev/src/trans42src Essentially, it is a big list of rules, along with an even bigger list of exceptions, by word. I remember that I played a lot with it attempting to create a somewhat better version of Geman translator rules - without really succeeding. Unfortunately, a lot of the melody of speech are built into the narrator.device, and thus not accessible on the level of the translator. This is why every language sounds as if an american attempts to speak a foreign language (or, shortly, "not convincing"). |
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