PlainTalk

PlainTalk is the collective name for several speech synthesis (MacInTalk) and speech recognition technologies developed by Apple, Inc.

In 1990, Apple invested a lot of work and money into speech recognition technology, hiring many respected researchers in the field. The result was "PlainTalk," released with the AV Quadras of 1993. It was made a standard system component in System 7.1.2, and has since been shipped on all PowerPC and even some 68K Macintoshes.

oftware

peech synthesis

Technology

Apple's text-to-speech uses diphones. Compared to other methods of synthesizing speech, it is not very resource-intensive, but there is a limit to how natural the synthesis can get. See the speech synthesis article for details. American English and Spanish versions have been available, but since the advent of Mac OS X, Apple has shipped only American English voices, relying on third-party suppliers such as Acapela Group to supply voices for other languages.

An application programming interface known as the Speech Manager enables third-party developers to use speech synthesis in their applications. There are various control sequences that can be used to fine-tune the intonation and rhythm. The volume, pitch and rate of the speech can be configured as well.

Input to the synthesiser can be controlled explicitly using a phoneme alphabet called the AppleBet.

The original MacInTalk

The first component of PlainTalk was a system extension called MacInTalk (a play-on-words of Macintosh) which provided text-to-speech conversion. It was used by Apple in the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, to let the personal computer introduce itself to the world. The original MacInTalk was never supported officially by Apple, though they let some developers use and refine it, e.g. Steve Halls for the Talking Moose. Software Automatic Mouth (S.A.M.) for the Apple II and other early personal computers was developed by Joseph Katz and Mark Barton for "Don't Ask Software", a company founded by Randy Simon to sell an ELIZA-type program called “Abuse”, which would converse with the user in an insulting manner. S.A.M. for the Macintosh was the first MacInTalk. Katz & Barton’s present company is now SoftVoice, which markets the present day version of this software as SoftVoice TTS.

MacInTalk 2

Eventually, Apple released a supported speech synthesis system, called MacInTalk 2. It supports any Macintosh running System Software 6.0.7 or later. It remained the recommended version for slower machines even after the release of MacInTalk 3 and Pro.

MacinTalk 2 introduced a great variety of voices. Apart from the standard adult voices 'Bruce', 'Fred' and 'Kathy', and children's voices like 'Princess' and 'Junior', various novelty voices were included, like 'Whisper', 'Zarvox' (a robot voice with melodic background sounds, with a similar voice called 'Trinoids' also included), 'Cellos' (a voice that sung its text to an Edvard Grieg tune, with similarly-singing voices like 'Good News', 'Bad News', 'Pipe Organ'), 'Albert' (a hoarse-sounding voice), 'Bells', 'Boing', 'Bubbles' etc.

Each of these voices came with its own example text, that would be spoken when one hit the 'Test' button in the Speech control panel. Some would just say their name, language and the version of MacinTalk they were introduced with. Others would say funny things, like 'I sure like being inside this fancy computer', or 'The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of a fast approaching train'.

MacInTalk 3, Pro

With the increase in computer power that the CPUs in AV Macs and PowerPC based Macintoshes provided, Apple could afford to increase the quality of the synthesis. MacInTalk 3 required a 33 MHz 68030 processor and MacInTalk Pro required a 68040 or better and at least 1 MB of RAM. Each synthesizer supported a different set of voices.

Text-to-speech in Mac OS X

Text-to-speech has been a part of every Mac OS X version. The Victoria voice was enhanced significantly in Mac OS X v10.3, and added as Vicki (Victoria was not removed). Its size was almost 20 times greater, because of the higher-quality diphone samples used. ()

A new, much more natural-sounding voice, called "Alex" has been added to the Mac text-to-speech roster with the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. [http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/accessibility.html]

peech recognition

Apple hired many speech recognition researchers in 1990. After about a year, they demonstrated a technology codenamed Casper. It was released as part of the PlainTalk package in 1993. Although available for all PowerPC Macintoshes and AV 68k machines (it was one of the few applications that made use of the DSP in the Centris 660AV and Quadra 840AV), it was not part of the default system install prior to Mac OS X. The user had to do a custom installation of the OS to get speech recognition capabilities.

Apple's speech recognition is voice-command oriented, i.e. not intended for dictation. It can be configured to listen for commands when a hot key is pressed, after being addressed with an activation phrase such as "Computer," or 'Macintosh," or without prompt. A graphical status monitor, often in the form of an animated character, provides visual and textual feedback about listening status, available commands and actions taken. It can also communicate back with the user using speech synthesis.

Early versions of the speech recognition provided full access to the menus. This support was later removed, since it required too many resources and made recognition less reliable, only to be re-added in Mac OS X 10.3 as a "universal access technology" called spoken user interface.

The user can launch items located in a special folder, called "Speakable Items", simply by speaking their name (while the system is in "listening" mode). Apple shipped a number of AppleScripts in this folder, but aliases, documents and folders can be opened in the same way.

Additional functionality is provided by individual applications. An application programming interface lets programs define and modify an available vocabulary. For example, the Finder provides a vocabulary for manipulating files and windows.

In popular culture

In music

The MacinTalk speech synthesis can be heard in a few songs. It can be heard in "Satisfaction" by Benny Benassi, as well as other songs by him, and "Tobys Mac" By Toby Mac. Its is also used in one of Radiohead's songs Fitter Happier off their OK Computer album, and is featured in the background of Paranoid Android, also from the same album. It was also used by the band Fall Out Boy in the beginning of their song Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy (Millennium Version), which is featured on the Director's Cut version of Take This To Your Grave. It was also used by Fall Out Boy at the end of the last track on their latest album Infinity on High, and at the end of the B-Side "GINASFS". The French band Air uses several Macintosh voices in their track "How Does it Make You Feel." Many Aphex Twin tracks including Funny Little Man and Cow Cud Is a Twin also feature PlainTalk.

In film

MacinTalk serves as the voice of AUTO in the 2008 Disney/Pixar film "WALL•E".

In television

MacinTalk was used to perform the part of the wheelchair-bound motor neurone disease patient with a voice synthesizer in the animated "Family Guy" episode "Ready, Willing and Disabled", who would later appear again in "Brian the Bachelor" and "Brian Goes Back To College". It was also used in the short-lived cartoon "Whatever Happened to Robot Jones?" as the voice of Robot Jones' father, Dad Unit.

In video games

MacinTalk was used in the game No More Heroes. Before each boss fight, the Whisper voice would announce the current boss's name.

Hardware

Apple produced a microphone called "Apple PlainTalk Microphone". It was introduced alongside the AV-enabled Quadras in 1993 but was also sold separately. It had a longer connector, and the tip was used to provide it with extra power. It was designed to be positioned on top of the screen and to be sensitive to sound from the front.

References

External links

* [ftp://mirror.apple.com/mirrors/Apple_Software_Updates/US/Macintosh/System/Speech/PlainTalk_1.5/ FTP server for most recent version of PlainTalk (classic systems)]
* [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Intro_Demo.txt&topic=Marketing&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium Folklore.org: The Original Macintosh, about the Macintosh introduction]
* [http://developer.apple.com/ue/speech/ Apple speech documentation for developers]
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