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Voice instructions for front ends
JoyMonkey:
I just bought one of the LCD displays that Maraxle brought to everyones attention in this thread. Basically, after you select a game in your front end, it will display tiny text files for each game explaining what each button does.
While I was thinking this thing out, a thought hit me; couldn't the same thing be done using a command line voice synthesizer? So when you pick the game, the synthesizer reads you the instructions while the emulator runs your game.
Anyone know of a suitable command line voice utility for Windows?
screaming:
--- Quote from: JoyMonkey on April 29, 2004, 01:32:09 pm ---I just bought one of the LCD displays that Maraxle brought to everyones attention in this thread. Basically, after you select a game in your front end, it will display tiny text files for each game explaining what each button does.
While I was thinking this thing out, a thought hit me; couldn't the same thing be done using a command line voice synthesizer? So when you pick the game, the synthesizer reads you the instructions while the emulator runs your game.
Anyone know of a suitable command line voice utility for Windows?
--- End quote ---
Windows XP has a function to do this, but you need to download Microsoft's Speech Agent, or something like that. I know it will read things on the screen, but IIRC, you can also speak commands to it too.
Other than that, there's DragonSpeak and IBM's ViaVoice, but they are generally on the expensive side.
/steve
Aceldamor:
I know 3d arcade uses the voice speech agent in XP....but it only reads what cab your in front of....mabye peter could mod it to explain instructions since it only reades info collected from the dat file to begin with (I think). Mabye it can be pointed to read from the .txt files that the LCD app creates?
Even better, having it explain instructions on a keypress..PM )P( and see if it's a possibility
Howard_Casto:
Yeah 3d arcade does it... the lost build of lazarus did it too. The problem I had with it (and why i removed it prior to dk) is that the voices sound horrible.... the speach engine mis-pronounces a lot of words. Not only that but it tends to speak slower than a normal person would. You can adjust the speed, but then it sounds like someone is "fast forwarding" the message.
Long story short, for short phrases like 3d arcade does, it's decent, but that voice will drive you mad speaking any longer than that.
Lilwolf:
I personally like the idea of a middle where peice which gets data from controls.dat (and I would personally like a new version allcontrols.dat which contains basic info, unchecked info... to fill in the gaps of controls.dat),
then it would popup a picture of your controls... and label them.
So everone would use a little graphic tool to configure your layout (graphically) and specify which control is what key (or button # in mame). Then it would popup a picture.... you hit a key, and it launches mame (or whatever)