Zabaware Support Forums

Zabaware Forums => Ultra Hal 7.0 => Topic started by: billp on January 03, 2005, 11:03:55 am

Title: How to make character animate during texttospeech?
Post by: billp on January 03, 2005, 11:03:55 am

SAPI 5 Text to Speech engines such as Hal's will speak in real time text that has been copied to the clipboard.
Dear all,

How do I get the Haptek Player in Hal or PeoplePutty to mouth the audio thus produced?

I could write a Theatre Script in PeoplePutty, but that all has to be preprepared. I want the flexibility and speed to control the Character with the 'copy to clipboard' function just as I can with Text to Speech.

Many thanks,

Bill Peck

Title: How to make character animate during texttospeech?
Post by: Art on January 03, 2005, 01:03:26 pm

Hi Bill and welcome to the forum.

I think what he was after was how to have the HAL character's lips move as the speech is being read.
If one uses the HalPad or clipboard or even CyberBuddy, The character in the HAL window (preferably Hapteks) does not move their lips even though the text is being sounded.

I think he will have to resort to the theater feature found in People Putty.

Title: How to make character animate during texttospeech?
Post by: snarfmon on March 01, 2005, 05:45:16 am

Yeah, I would also like to see the haptek characters lip sync text files, I found that the MSagent chars. will lip sync the text docs but they seem to glitch every now and then.

Title: How to make character animate during texttospeech?
Post by: Rich_A on March 02, 2005, 12:38:14 am

Hi Guys,
I started writing a script a while back to get my Hal's Haptek character to lip sync when reading the clipboard. But I didn't get very far! So far I got it to actually work if I copy only one sentence at a time to the clipboard which really isn't practical but it was just a way to start and develop things further and then I got side-tracked with other things instead.

But the problem that I ran into was I needed a way to be able to detect carriage returns within a body of text being copied into the clipboard. If I could program carriage return detection into my script then the body of text being copied can be converted into a more readable form for Hal, because what my script actually does is it appends the contents of the clipboard directly into one of Hal's user brain files and then creates keyword triggers so that I can say "Read the clipboard" and that's the trigger to read the clipboard text fed into Hal. And then when Hal finishes reading the clipboard with lip sync the appended text and it's keyword triggers automatically get removed from the user brain file.

It's a lot of work to do for something simple like reading a clipboard so I just gave up! There's probably a better way that someone else might figure out anyway. It's really just that damn carriage return detection that totally stumped me. But the other thing I came up with about reading text directly into the user brain file is the start of a new way of teaching Hal to learn from a text file instead of using the built-in learn from a text file function that everyone says don't work good. So I'm going to follow through with that instead and then see what happens.
Best Regards,
Rich_A