This speech recognition driven text display would try to represent spoken language as acurately, succinctly and readably as possible. The text could be colored on a spectrum from blue to red according to the loudness or softness, or emotive tone of a voice. The text could climb or fall -- within a small space on the page according to pitch, and bunch up or spread out according to meter. The system could be networked and self-improving and google-like in that it would decide which attributes were most effective by how much they were used. The goal of the system would be to better represent tone of voice in text.

All-so, foe-net-tick spel-ling and an em-fah-sis on rith-mick sill- lih-ba-za-shun wood bee help-full.
-- JesusHChrist, Mar 16 2005

HB archives: Math-modified Language Math-modified_20Language
Circa Jan 02. Tertially related but much annotated and debated idea from [RayfordSteele]. [bristolz, Mar 17 2005]

I'm pretty sure I've seen some of these ideas on the halfbakery but I can't find them by subject.
-- JesusHChrist, Mar 16 2005


Nah, don't like it. What you describe, I think, is infinitely better accomplished via good writing skills.
-- waugsqueke, Mar 16 2005


jesusH-mediocrist!
-- crater, Mar 16 2005


Example: "Oh, What a marvellous idea."

Sarcasm, or truth? How would it be marked up, either way?
-- Ling, Mar 16 2005


The text of "Oh, What a marvellous idea." could be extended or contracted, raised or lowered, increased or decreased in font, and colored according to variables from a voiceprint of someone saying, "Oh, What a marvellous idea."

Maybe like this:

"OHH, what a M A R V O L O U S idea!"

or this:

...HHH........... .............ARRRR...... ........De...
O... ...HHHH...what.a.MAA.... .....VOLOUS...i....a!

--except more subtley, and without the periods.
-- JesusHChrist, Mar 17 2005


The phonetic spelling is a real anchor weight to reading as we people tend to read by word shape, or even phrase shape, recognition (much as those who read music well see the overall shape and pattern of music rather than the individual notes).

Making the language as expressive as musical notation is, in my opinion, a giant reduction in expressiveness. The musical compass is very small compared to that of language, at least English.
-- bristolz, Mar 17 2005


Say A-bla Es-Pan-Yol?
-- JesusHChrist, Mar 17 2005


How about representing the intonation, pitch, rhythm and volume of speech as ... (I know this sounds crazy) ....an audio file?
-- Basepair, Mar 17 2005


Only that it's not accessible all at once like text. You can scan a testimony visually better than auditorily. This would be a way of getting lie-detector-like information all in one place at one time.
-- JesusHChrist, Mar 17 2005


Actually, THIS idea might solve the problem of getting a computer to read a book in an expressive way! Humans can figure out loudness and tone of voice and pacing from context and punctuation, but a computer needs other, more specific cues. You could have it read blue text in a sad tone of voice, red text in an angry tone, I guess purple could be lustful... a whole new meaning to purple prose!
-- submitinkmonkey, Mar 17 2005


I like the idea, as a way to standardise vowel sounds and pitch changes. It might allow people to communicate across languages due to the standardisation - however, in many ways - i.e. within speech recognition systems, this is kind of baked in that the recorded sounds are tokenised and stored as discrete syllable patterns which are then compared to a database of known pattern/word sets. It's just that this internal notation has been designed for computers rather than for people.

If memory serves me correctly, there used to be a standard phonetic notation used in the early days of speech synthesisers. I can remember typing strange looking syllables into the machine in order to try and get it so sound like it was from 'up north' etc.

So, as much as I like the idea (providing a way to visually read voice transcripts in a way that keeps as much of the voice patterns intact during the conversion) It's use is reasonably limited, and is just a refinement of something that's been around for 15 years(the first time I remember playing with a speech synthesiser was late 80's)
-- zen_tom, Mar 17 2005



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