(no subject)

[jack]

In the past, as everyone knows who's ever heard an old scifi film, an 80s voice synthesiser, or Stephen Hawking, or experimented when the first forays of automatic[1] text-to-speech came into mainstream operating systems, computer announcements were made by a robotic flattened voice. THAT-TALKED-LIKE-THIS-SEN-TENCE.

In the future, as everyone knows who's heard a recent scifi film, heard the computer voice in Command and Conquer or Portal, or (I hear) been to Japan, knows, computer announcements will be made by a pleasant polyphonic tonal but neutral female voice, the sort that projects beauty non-sexual beauty.

What I don't understand is why, in between, in the present, as anyone who had bought a cheap but functional Lexmark series 12XX printer knows, computer announcements are made by recordings of a self-satisfied sounding American[2]. Can it be the future already, please?

[1] Typo: automatical

[2] I don't really object, it just has an unpolished quality that makes me comment on it anyway. It sounds sufficiently like an actual American to draw attention, yet repeats exactly the same intonation, etc, reminding you it's artificial. Avoiding this is exactly how the future announcements are so good. But even if audible "printing is finished" announcements are actually a fairly good idea, I decided that if I cared enough to write a blog post

[3] Witness the lack of "one-liner" tag, for though this post contains one simple, brief, ungrandious idea, it runs to three paragraphs (six with footnotes), and you might say, "three paragraphs on a simple idea" is a normal ideal length of a post, rather than a thousand-word musing cut short :)

Comments

[kyte-fitzrimble.livejournal.com]

Having my printer tell me repeatedly to "please load paper in the auto-sheet feeder" is probably the nost annoying thing ever, Especially since there usually already is paper in it.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh god, yes, that's the phrase Mum always quotes. Because it's so rare that I or she prints, I mainly find it hilarious. The self-confidence of the announcement combines really badly with the fact that it's not magically accurate. (You know, if it's a similar driver to the one i had, you CAN turn it off. I decided to do so NOW rather than wait until it really annoyed me.)

[naath.livejournal.com]

The printer has only a small number of phrases - so it's not really 'synthesiser', it might actually be a recording that only sounds artificial because it says the same thing in exactly the same way over and over.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. This is definitely a recording. But I think it falls into an uncanny valley. It sounds like an actual self-confident American offering you advice on your printer. If it sounded less so, you'd feel less psychotic whenever it tells you to put in paper you already put in. If there were an ACTUAL self-confident American there, eventually he'd get the message that he wasn't being very accurate. But somewhere between is the most awkward compromise :)

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

Yay, you've reminded me of how the Amiga came with two libraries: a phoneme-to-sound library called "narrator.lib" and an English-to-phonemes library called "translator.lib". And AMOS Basic let you call both of them together with the SAY command to get laughably mis-stressed synthspeech, or (in very funky fashion) call straight into narrator.lib with a string of the phonemes it understands to try to improve on translator.lib's output. And the phoneme format was even documented. It was awesome.

If we have to listen to endless recorded voices on automated switchboard systems, for some reason I like it when they're Scottish.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:) Oh yes.

If we have to listen to endless recorded voices on automated switchboard systems, for some reason I like it when they're Scottish.

Apparently Scottish voices are just friendlier like that :) (I remember reading an old article when the telephone system was being revamped a little, describing with wonder a BT call centre started somewhere in Scotland, and how it was amazing that you could bring jobs to a community that didn't have them, and simultaneously make London less crowded. And yet, something went horribly wrong somewhere.)