Type to Talk Phones

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NikkiJohnson

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I am doing some research for my boss, and I was wondering if anyone knows of a phone (cell or home) that will convert what you type into talk...which won't require relay operator? Please help me.
 
Depending on your needs, yes. You can't do speech-to-text, but you could do text-to-speech. Basically, the easiest way to do this is with VOIP (a phone that runs on your computer) - Skype is the best known, but there are others. I use Gizmo; Vonage is also popular.

So, it's running on your computer. Then you use a text-to-speech (TTS) program. What you use is going to be dependent on your operating system; I don't know what you'd use on Windows, but Mac OS X has TTS built in (in terminal, it's the "say" command). On linux, I forget the exact name of the program I played with - either FreeTTS or Festival. Whichever it is might run on Windows as well, but I'm not sure.

You have to connect the output of your TTS program to the input of your VOIP program. On Linux, I think you could do this with esd, but I'm not sure on the details. On OS X, there used to be a program called ... SoundFlower? That was free, but I don't think it works on the new (Intel) Macs, and it's not being developed anymore. Still, I'm sure there's a way to do it. With Windows, I'm not sure what you'd use.

This is all fairly doable if you're fairly geeky, or it'd probably be a modest-size project for a decent programmer to put it all together in an "install and go" package that anyone would be comfortable with.

Hope that helps.
 
One more thing: making this work without writing code is certainly possible for someone who's comfortable tinkering, but it'd be a messy and inelegant solution. However, I think Java (a popular programming language) has all the libraries built in that you'd need to do both TTS and VOIP, so a fairly nice program could be put together by someone who knew what they were doing.
 
ismi, I don't think it's absolutely necessary to use a soft phone. Running a cable from the speaker output on the sound card to the headset jack on the phone should do the trick. (you'll have to use one or more adapters but they're readily available from radio shack or online.)

The trick is finding some good text to speech software, there's free software available, but since they're trying to do a phone conversation they'll have to experiment until they find one that works for them.
 
Hi,

I've actually developed a VOIP server
and softphone that is designed specifically
for direct communication between
deaf and hearing WITHOUT using the
relay.

It can take TTY calls, turn them into
text, then turn into speech to send to
phone receiver, also can take speech
from hearing on phone, turn to text,
then turn to tty and send to tty.

Also, the softphone is free if you
become a paid member of my site...

You should check out Off World Technology LLC - Second Challenge And Solution, then click on the 'click here for free demo' to see me using this software.
 
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