Strange -- and Funny -- Things

Fun with Speech Output

The software i use to turn text on the screen into spoken words changed the voices available to use with it. The upgrade removed the Microsoft Speech Engine, one of the better choices with clear and human qualities. I should tell you here that the software always comes with a number of choices, only one of which is really human sounding. The others are robotic or at best dull voiced. The new human sounding voice is called NeoSpeech, and all I can imagine since this was supposed to be an up-grade, implying improvement, is that NeoSpeech is less expensive than the Microsoft text-to-speech. It not only cannot read many odd characters, which, as a novelist and amateur historian of the Anglo Saxon period, I am wont to use, but it has the strangest tendency to change how it says certain things.

For example, the boice on my computer has developed a lisp. Not always. It said the s's in "always" and "said" just fine. But try it with

The kingdom in my novel is "Críslicland" which the computer now reads as C. R. Slickland". Words with "æ" are also minus that phoneme. The word "ítheling" is "thee-ling" with the soft "th".

The funniest lately, however, is a word read aloud every time I open the Blogger dashboard for my blogs. I was puzzled when suddenly the male voice I am using at the moment started saying "innuendo" at certain times, none of which involved that specific word. It finally occured to me that what it was reading is "in new window" but the computer is definitely saying "in nyoo wen do".

For the record, I contacted the company. This software is, after all, costs several hundred dollars. I told them about the oddities with the speech... They told me, "We are aware of the problems and will have a better version in the next upgrade". In other words, "If you want a better product, you will have to buy it."

Hys-torical Dreams

One night recently I had a spate of historical dreams. All I can really remember of two of them is a line from each, but I suspect the line is the best part.

"Henry II was such a great soldier that he was even commanding armies from the womb."

Jim told me me he had gone out for coffee with a Norman king named William. I replied, "Well it must have been William the Conqueror then, because William Rufus hated coffee."

Do you think I have been reading too much historical fiction?