[Elecraft] Titanic radio traffic link

[Buddy Brannan]

Hi Fred,

No, I got that they were translating morse shorthand into plain English, but I can absolutely assure you that those were, in fact, software based speech synthesizers. I'm not sure about the German accented one, or the one that played the part of Olympic, but I definitely heard Neospeech Paul, Cepstral David and Cepstral Frank, Realspeak Tom and Realspeak Lee, and the part of Titanic was played by, I think the actual company is Babelsoft, anyway, his name's Peter. There might have also been Realspeak Daniel in there as well, I don't recall. This shows just how far text to speech has come. You're right in one respect though; those voices are modeled on and synthesized from actual human speech. 


--
Buddy Brannan, KB5ELV - Erie, PA
Phone: (814) 860-3194 or 888-75-BUDDY



On Apr 12, 2012, at 10:25 PM, Fred Jensen <k6dgw at foothill.net> wrote:

> On 4/12/2012 6:49 PM, Buddy Brannan wrote:
>> The saddest part of this report (at least on a personal level) is
>> that I know most of the text to speech synthesizers they're using.
> 
> I don't think that was quite it, Buddy.  Knowing the BBC, I think they 
> translated the Morse to "normal" English, what ever that is.  "DE" 
> became "This is," "MGY" became "Titanic," QTH became "Our position is, 
> and the like.  I'm not sure why they went for the sort-of computer 
> voice, it actually sounded more to me like a real human trying to sound 
> a little computer-ish.  But I did think it began to give a feeling for 
> the dire moments.  I suspect "Shut Up, Shut Up" might have been QRT or QRX
> 
> We also need to realize that the RO's were not using Elecraft equipment. 
> :-)  Their rotary sparks were hugely noisy, their receivers [and the RO] 
> heard [if it was very strong] whatever the antenna did not filter out, 
> DSP hadn't been invented yet, nor had keyers, QSK, or cans that covered 
> your ears and suppressed some of the external noise.
> 
> I've always wondered what it was like at Cape Race during the Titanic 
> sinking.  I got to handle one small sort-of emergency while at the 
> coastal marine station.  I was about to leave for college and I think 
> the OG's wanted me to get one emergency in my logbook.  All sorts of 
> images went through my mind, none of which actually happened aboard the 
> ship of course.  No one sank, no one even got wet ... but it was a very 
> exciting hour or so for me, the CG was having problems copying them, QSP 
> for the USCG was a big deal for a 16-yr old ham of 3 years.
> 
> 73,
> 
> Fred K6DGW
> - Northern California Contest Club
> - CU in the 2012 Cal QSO Party 6-7 Oct 2012
> - www.cqp.org
> 
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