the following is an email i got from Tim Hughes, maker of software keynote gold multimedia. so, the next question is. a. i have to see if tim can help me register this keynote gold demo that i have. and b. would it be possible to have NVDA communicate with keynote gold running either in a windows CE emulator, windows95-vm, or windows3.1 inside talking dosbox? now I am off to ask tim if he can at least help me register the demo software that i have installed in talking dosbox.

Hi Joshua,

From your emails, my understanding is that you really want a genuine Keynote Gold voice using a sapi5 interface so that the voice can be used in modern versions of Windows for any application that uses text to speech, including screen readers and the like. You want Keynote Gold because it is fast and responsive, and the voice is familiar and brings back warm memories from your youth years ago, when it was very enabling in your life. You are not alone in this desire: there are plenty of blind friends who also love the sound of Keynote Gold.

I can understand why you would want all of that.

Thanks for the comments about the synthesiser’s responsiveness. When I wrote the software-only package for Keynote, that was my top goal, as I knew it was important from my market research. I’m glad the result worked as expected. I got a kick out of doing it, because it was technically challenging, and the result was very robust and also clean and simple - an engineering work of art. So, I like the old synthesiser too.

Regrettably, to change some other synthesiser to sound like Keynote would be an exercise in frustration, massively time consuming, and unlikely to be perfect. I’m not in a position to tackle a job like that.

The two options you have would be:
(a) whoever owns the rights to Keynote Gold right now, could repackage it into a sapi5 interface. Having written the original packaging for Windows 95 and the like, I know that this is possible technically. Again, it would be a reasonable sized job, probably 3 to 12 man months minimum, and so it would cost roughly $100k to $250k for development, without any marketing/distribution tasks. Again, I’m not in a position to do this, however if the demand is there, and enough people are willing to contribute, who knows?
(b) finding a way (you will need software developers to help) to use the Keynote gold running in the emulator to receive input from the sapi5 interface in Windows. This sounds really clunky but there may be ways of simplifying the problem. Obviously, I don’t recommend this idea, but sometimes it turns out that the pieces of the puzzle exist.

Again, I’m not in a position to tackle any of these tasks. There may be hobbyist software enthusiast who would like to however, and I wish you well in locating them.

I do have one question — how did you manage to get in touch? It’s a small world, and I’m always interested in the way in which the connections between people are made.

Good luck,

Kind regards
Tim

well, according to tim it would cost $100000 to $300000 to do anything with it for some reason. for that price I may as well just stick to using the sapi5 eloquence that i bought.

there may be a better solution. I found a very responsive and fast sapi5 version of rh-voice free open source tts, based on festival. It's nearly as responsive as eloquence and espeak and you can also make new voices with it using pre-recorded sentences. it is at:

https://github.com/Olga-Yakovleva/RHVoice/wiki

So I emailed the author and i am waiting for him to get back to me on the voice creation process. So based on that, it may be possible to make keynote gold read the required recordings into wave files and use those to build an english rh-voice, voice, based on it. will it sound perfect? no but it'll be pretty darn close.

BTW I'm waiting for the spanish versión of RHVoice.

circumReality doesn't sound good in general. perhaps rh-voice would sound better?

i got the following message from jonathan sharp, maker of keysoft for windows, and keysoft gold a version of keysoft that worked with keynote gold multimedia.
Hi Josh,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. To answer some of your questions:

* Keynote Gold speech used a speech engine licensed from Berkeley Speech Technologies, which was later bought by  Lernout & Hauspie, who eventually went our of business. All PulseData did was package the engine with APIs and, before Keynote Gold Multimedia, built an external box that ran it.  I don’t remember being much involved with this and don’t remember who was, that could be of any help.  Later versions of the BrailleNote used Eloquence.  Sorry I don’t have the source code.

* I don’t have the facility to register demo software.  HumanWare will have the rights to do that, but I doubt whether anyone over in Montreal would know anything about it. The only person I know who might know something is Maurice Sloane, who was the NZ sales and support person.  I haven’t caught up with Maurice for a few years so don’t know if his LinkedIn profile is up to date, but you could try messaging him, he is one of my LinkedIn connections.

* Sorry I wouldn’t have time to help with writing any software.

Best regards

Jonathan

well at least people are responding, which is a good sign. I remember some of those being used in other contexts
and I am happy with that, so it does not have to be solely text to speech for me.