MAS.632 Conversational Computer Systems - MIT OpenCourseWare

"Welcome to Voiced Mail. Please log in."
Inlteodive Voice Respme 127
userpresses4-3-3-5 (sequence for "geek", the user's login).
"Hello Chris Schmandt. You have twelve new messages.
Four from Walter Bender.
Message one. This is a very long message; it's about window system
subroutines . . -.
userpresses 1 (next message) .
"Message two. It's about the new conference room.
Can we get together tomorrow afternoon to decide about chairs?"
userpresses7 (affirmative reply).
"Message sent. Message three. It's about Monday's demo... "
userpresses4 (next sender) .
"Two messages from Ben Stoltz.
Message one. It's about the driver bug...
Figure 6.10. A sample Voiced Mail session.
Voiced Mail compromised intelligibility for speed by playing text somewhat
faster than the default synthesis rate specified by the synthesizer hardware. At
any moment, the user could invoke the repeat command. This command would
cause the sentence currently being spoken (or which had just been spoken) to be
repeated at 75% speed. If repeat was invoked again on the sentence, the sentence
was spelled letter by letter.
Spell mode is so slow as to be nearly useless, however, and it is also quite difficult
to follow. An alternate strategy, developed shortly after Voiced Mail, passes
the message body through the local spelling checker dictionary. Those words not
found in the dictionary are spelled. This will catch most typos as well as many of
the proper nouns that might be particularly challenging to synthesize. For
example, the phrase, "Schmandt debugged the sotfware yesterday morning"
would be pronounced "S-c-h-m-a-n-d-t debugged the s-o-t-f-w-a-r-e yesterday
morning."
Advuntagn ofMuopik Me
One of the advantages of electronic mail is the ease of posting a reply to the
sender ofa message. While reading mail, one is usually positioned at a screen and
keyboard, which also provide the user interface for typing a reply. A single