[TUHS] speak and speech synthesis

[Rob Pike via TUHS]

So many examples. Quinlan became Finland, for example. Ultraviolet had a
long 'a', infrared sounded as a past participle.

I enjoyed typing unpronounceable sequences of letters to it, such as lfvbm
(all labials) and seeing what happened. I forget the sequence that got it
to whistle but we did make Kernighan sound even stranger than most
strangers mangle it by putting a chirp on the tail.

-rob


On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 1:01 AM Douglas McIlroy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> Clipped consonants, not necessarily initial, were always a problem.
> They made many single-word Votrax utterances unintelligible. One of my
> favorite examples was
>     cheek, chief, cheat, cheap
> which which was essentially indistinguishable from
>      cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep
>
> Another favorite bad example was a list of composers. Failure there
> was due to the pronunciation rules' ignorance of foreign names.
>      Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Respighi, Tchaikowsky
> came out
>      Batch, Brams, Beet Oven, Ress Spy E, Chay Kowsky
>
> Doug
>