Today’s blog is mainly about the mp3 conversation extracts from Timing, which I talked about last week. And right up front here are links to my favourite two…

• On board Rydal’s ship, the Heron… http://datascenesdev.com/Alexa/voicefiles/All_Extract_A.mp3

• On board Parvati’s ship, the Parakeet… http://datascenesdev.com/Alexa/voicefiles/All_Extract_C.mp3

 

While talking about Timing, it seems a good idea to remind everyone about a recent review which captured neatly a great deal of what  was trying to convey in the story: “a story that provides questions as well as answers, thrill and satisfaction, and an adventure that can’t be beat“.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks they’ll be uploaded to YouTube, but for now they are just audio links included below and on the appropriate blog page. You’ll find more about this below. In passing, there’s a small prize available for the first person who correctly spots what’s wrong with the voice selection for Chandrika! Also, and unrelated to that, you’ll hear that not all of the voices are equally successful. I shall continue to tweak them, so hopefully the quality will steadily improve.

But before that, NASA just released two YouTube videos to celebrate the two year anniversary of when the New Horizons probe was at nearest approach to Pluto and Charon. They have turned the collection of images and other telemetry into flyby simulations of the dwarf planet and its moon, as though you were manoeuvring over them. Both the colours and the vertical heights of surface features have been exaggerated so you can get a better sense of what you are seeing, but that aside, it’s as close as most of us will get to personally experiencing these places.

• Pluto: https://youtu.be/g1fPhhTT2Oo

• Charon: https://youtu.be/f0Q7O7TZ7Ks

OK, back to Polly. As well as specifying which of several different voices you want, you can give Polly some metadata about the sentence to help generate correct pronunciation. Last week I talked about getting proper nouns correct, like Mitnash. But in English you also get lots of words which are spelled the same but pronounced differently – homonyms. The one which I ran into was “minute”, which can either be a unit of time (min-nit) or something very small (my-newt). Another problem case I found was “produce” – was I expecting the noun form (prod-yuce) or the verb (pro-deuce)?

In all such cases, Polly tries to guess from context which you mean, but sometimes guesses wrong. Happily you can simply add some metadata to say which you want. Sometimes this is simply a matter of adding in a tag saying “I want the noun”. Other times you can say which of several alternate senses of the word you want, and simply check the underlying list until you find the right one. And if all else fails, there’s always the option of spelling it out phonetically…