UPDATE ON SPEAQUALIZER AND TALKING XTERMINAL PROJECT

From: Brian Buhrow (buhrow@moria)
Date: Sun Mar 06 1994 - 21:42:26 PST


        Hello friends and members of the NFB R&D committee. Allow me to take
a few moments to update you on the state of the talking Xterminal project
and the Speaqualizer project.

        The American Printing House for the Blind has shipped me a set of
PROMS in order that I might load the latest versions of the RC Systems
speech algorithm we have for Speaqualizer and so that I might incorporate
the new code we have for the Speaqualizer into a new release of the
Speaqualizer. The new version is compiled up and waiting for me to bring
the chips to it tomorrow. It will be version 2.4. This stuff will get
shipped to APH on Tuesday March 8, 1994 and they should have it some time
next week.
        In addition to making the current PrOM changes to the Speaqualizer, I wrote
an adendum to the manual describing the new command set. I have
transmitted this manual to APH and they will incorporate it into a new set
of documentation for the Speaqualizer.
        Although improvements from this point on are not at the top of my
priority queue, I have begun work on some further improvements for the
Speaqualizer which should make it even more usable than it is today.

        XTERMINAL PROJECT

        The development machine for this project is configured and ready to
go. It has a 40mb DOS partition so that we can run dos and windows on one
partition in addition to running NetBSD (Unix look-alike) and Xwindows. I
have obtained the source code we need to modify the OS for speech and to
modify the X drivers.
        
        WHAT WE NEED NOW
        What we need now is to hash out the details of what kind of speech
access we want, what kind of alliances we want to pursue with software
developers, and what kind of programming expertese we want to hire for the
job. The first step, in my view, would be to nail down what software
platforms we're going to work on and whether or not we're going to use any
pre-existing speech code.
        Please feel free to provide suggestions, comments, offers, or anything
that you feel would be relevant for this project. Anyone interested in
collaborating with me to come up with a job description for programming
some of this stuff should contact me directly so we can talk about what we
need.

        I'll keep this list abreast of what is going on here. So far it's
early days, but I'm getting very excited about what we're doing and look
forward to presenting a working model at an NFB convention.
-Brian



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