[Cuis-dev] Text to Speech (was Re: Porting State of Magma)

[Gerald Klix]

On 6/8/21 10:11 AM, Luciano Notarfrancesco via Cuis-dev wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Jun 2021 at 10:57 PM Juan Vuletich via Cuis-dev <
> cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> wrote:
> 
>>
>> Not having used ImageSegments in decades, I still believe that making
>> them work in Cuis is entirely possible, and not too much work.
>>
>> But I'm not sure if that would, for example, suit your needs. It was a
>> good solution to give users comfortable access to content that was much
>> larger than available RAM. In these days, I don't see much need for that
>> use case. And it doesn't offer most of what a database offers. In many
>> cases, SmartRefStream is a good substitute.
> 
> 
> I haven’t used image segments in many years too, and I don’t think I’ll
>   need them for anything in the foreseeable future. In the past I used them
> twice, as far as I can remember. The first time it was to store diphones
> (pairs of phonemes) for a text to speech system that was much better than
> the one that ended up in the Squeak image, but had the disadvantage of
> depending on this database of diphones. 
Do have this one still around? Does it support German, or can it be
changed to support German?
> The second time it was for storing
> maps and satellite images downloaded from some openly available servers at
> the time (before keyhole, google maps and all that). In both cases loading
> speed was important, specially in the TTS system in order to get response
> times close to real-time, and image segments were perfect for that because
> they just loaded a piece of object memory without running any Smalltalk
> code, super fast. I used them in combination with weak references and
> finalization, I think, in order to offload stuff automatically if memory
> was getting tight.
On a second thought, this might make sense for Cuis on IoT devices.
I consider Cuis better suited for that task than, well, Pharo
(just to name the favorite target of my wrath :).
> 
> It might be worth keeping them also because of their beauty. I always found
> the idea very elegant, not just a hack.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Gerald