[TUHS] speak and speech synthesis

[Peter Yardley via TUHS]

One of my friends initials, the name he went by, was SBG. The text to speech pronounced that as Spug. So he was known as Spug ever after. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On 18 Sep 2026, at 1:29 pm, Rob Pike via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
>>