Category: Geeks r Us
I've been thinking about speech synthesizers VS braille displays and wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on that.Do you always use ether braille or speech? Do you like to use different synths for different kinds of work? Just any thing goes?
if it comes to detailed work i tend to want to use braille more as it's what i've been trained in the most. If however speed is more important i use speech. Would use braille more if i had the ability too though
If you're gonna read you want Braille. but for typing things in speech can help otherwise you would have to take your hands off the keys to read the display and check.
I have used Braille-only for some things, a lot of things actually, but have learned to tolerate the ragging nature of naggity speech for those things where it is faster. But Braille by its nature and context shows you what you need without having to count off spaces or make the reader spell something or some other blunderingly slow inefficient painful way to do it with the speech.
But for keying something in or otherwise using the keyboard, speech feedback is quicker, I will give you that.
In my experience using both will give you the best results most of the time. I agree with you guys on the point that it's speech for speed and braille for details. For example I could not do any kind of math without the braille display. But when I'm reading text or surfing the web I generally use speech. But I'm also wondering about how well people are recieving the new realistically sounding synths. Personally I don't like the fact that you usually can't speed them nearly as much up as eloquence and I like to work with my synth at pretty high speeds.
When I'm on the computer, I use speech. I have to use Braille for reading books or proofreading things though. One thing I think we miss out on when we use speech synthesizers is the fact you can't get a clear idea of how someone else meant something they wrote. It's easy to listen to the cold, emotionless way Eloquence reads something, for example, and flip out on a person for making a harmless or sarcastic comment, just because the way you heard it makes it sound like they were really mad at you, or deliberately trying to get a rise out of you. Even a Braille display wouldn't completely remedy that, since most of the way people mean things comes from the sound of their own voice, but that's just one of a few reasons why I don't like talking to people online.
I don't think that has any thing to do with braille displays or wpeech synths. That's much more just how digital communication works. We can't hear the voice of the person we're talking to and generally only get their words which is not nearly every thing.
Yeah, but the synth definitely makes it harder. When you read something, whether it's on a screen or in Braille, you expect that you won't get that kind of feedback. When you're using a screen reader, you are listening to it talk, which is just like listening to a person talk to you. Your brain tries to react the same way, but it can't, because of the way the synth distorts normal nuances of conversation.
Eloquence is bad at that but alex on the mac tries to match how it would really be if someone were saying it. it's as much up to the person writing the message or what ever as it is up to the synth to render it
That's true, but what I was getting at is that sarcasm doesn't really come through as well, or a minor argument can turn into something major just because the way Eloquence, and every other Windows-based speech synth I've tried, says things is so black and white. So you can either waste time trying to draw out aspects of a conversation that, if it was being carried out in real life, would be either implied, felt, or self-explanatory, or blow things out of proportion.
I use Eloquence on my computer and it works great for me most of the time. However I agree that braille can be more helpful in some cases, such as dealing with numbers or proofreading.
On android susan from I am going to kill this syth company's name "laquento" does a pretty good job expressing a conversation. When she sees the letters "zzz" a "kiss" or lol she starts laughing. Its quite neet, she even raises her voice when she sees exlamation marks.
When I was at School, I used my Braille Note Display, I sson realised that in this day and age, you need to use the Computer or Laptop in Workplaces. I now use a Laptop with JAWS for Windows and it's great. I still use the Braille display but only for reading books.