Archive for Software

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary

“The Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary is an open-source machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for North American English that contains over 134,000 words and their pronunciations.” One could use this data for speech recognition and speech synthesis, as the page suggests. One could also, presumably, use it to automatically create a rhyming dictionary, which is not a […]

AI-aided text-to-speech

I’ve written here in the past about speech recognition (column DD, and brief notes on Google Voice), but I haven’t written much about speech synthesis, except for a post about song synthesis and an aside in column iii. So I’m pleased to note that Google has made some remarkable improvements in text-to-speech lately. For example, […]

XXX: uʍop-ǝpısdn

It appears that in all these years, I’ve never yet written about turning text upside-down. Note: It’s possible that some parts of this column won’t be readable, depending on the font in which you’re reading it. Apologies if so. I think that if you view this column on the Words & Stuff site, in a […]

Neural net comes up with bird-species names

Janelle Shane, who has trained neural nets to generate entertainingly semi-plausible names for all sorts of things (Pokémon, Star Wars characters, etc), posted a new list about a month ago: bird names. But this time, most of the names weren’t much weirder than real names of bird species. Still, I enjoyed them. A few I […]