September 26, 2004
Here are my findings of Opera 7.60's speech synthesizer so far:
- It has issues with
:first-letter. It'll spell out the first letter, and then read the entire sentence. So:first-letterapplied to the sentence "Pasta tastes good!" comes out "Pee pasta tastes good!". - It says "double left angle bracket" and "double right angle bracket" when encountering « and », respectively (I believe it should say "quote" and "unquote", respectively, since these are quotation marks in both Norwegian, French, and German (although the Germans like to turn them the other way around)). I've gone through what I believe is the most correct procedure for identifying language, marking up quotations, and specifying quotation marks;
lang="no",<q>, andq:lang(no) { quotes: "«" "»" "<" ">" }. - It has real issues with inline elements; it effectively speaks out the contents of them by themselves. Thus, if an inline element is at the end of a sentence, it'll spell out the punctuation mark.
- It pronounces URLs surprisingly well.
You can see my test case for yourself.
If you want to change what Opera's saying when it doesn't understand your input when pressing and holding the Voice button (the default is Sorry, I did not understand
), look for the file vxmstrings_en-us.ini (it should be in the root folder, most probably Opera76) and edit the line nomatch = . My line says Eim sorry Dave, eim afraid I cant do that
. I wish I could use "I'm" and "can't", but it doesn't pronounce them well.
Incidentally, I've added quotes from 2001 to the Quotes page.