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Kevin Lenzo
Kevin Lenzo (born 1967) is an American computer scientist. He wrote the initial infobot, founded The Perl Foundation (and was its chairman until 2007) and the Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPC)., released CMU Sphinx into Open source, founded Cepstral LLC, and has been a major contributor to the Festival Speech Synthesis System, FestVox, and Flite. His voice is the basis for a number of synthetic voices, including FreeTTS, Flite, and the cmu_us_kal_diphone Festival voice. He has also contributed Perl modules to CPAN. Kevin was also a founding member of the 1980s funk band "Leftover Funk" See also * YAPC, the Yet Another Perl Conferences, founded by Kevin Lenzo * The Perl Foundation, co-founded with Kurt DeMaagd * Flite, Festival Speech Synthesis System and in particular kal_diphone (Kevin A Lenzo) made from his voice, and FestVox for building synthetic voices * The Infobot, an Internet Relay Chat agent * CMU Sphinx which he released into Open Source * FreeTTS, a Java port of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Infobot
Infobot is a Perl IRC bot, first written in 1995 by Kevin Lenzo. The bot's main goal was to remember URLs and associate them with a descriptive name, so whenever someone needed a specific URL they could ask the bot. For that reason, the first Infobot, running in #macintosh on the EFnet IRC network, had the nickname 'url'. Although the main project is now inactive, many forks from the original program were made, some of which are still active. Most of these forks carry extra features, such as googling a phrase given through the chat and saying the results of the query as messages directly in the chat. Operation The Infobot works by a method of factoids. It stores information in its database by connecting a phrase with its definition, usually an informative short line. It records its information by constantly listening to the chat (which is configurable). It states its factoids when it recognizes a question in the chat. For example: wikipedia is http://www.wikipedia.org/ :''T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synthetic Voices
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition. Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
