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This directory contains code to translate english text to phonetics, written
mostly by David Forster (forster@cs.umass.edu).  The file PHONEME-TRANSLATOR
contains the code which, given a set of rules, translates text to phonetics.
The file ENGLISH-PHONEMES defines the phonetic rules for english text.
These two files are portable Common Lisp.

The file TALK contains code which, given english text, will convert it to
phonetics and ``say'' it over the TI Explorer D/A converter.  This assumes
that there is a sample recorded for each of the ~40 phonemes used in
english.  Making these samples is very difficult, and I haven't really
succeeded yet.

I believe that the ``right'' way to do this is not to have prerecorded
samples for each sound, but rather, to generate the sounds by calculating
the appropriate waveforms.  Somewhere there must be a description of what
exactly the waveforms for the phonemes are, right?  There are lots of
text-to-speech programs for the toy computers...

If you want to play around with this code, you will probably find the sample
editor in the file ../SAMPLE.LISP to be useful.

Both David and I would love to see any improvements you make to this code.