Electronic paging system (EPS)

Speech synthesis is a very old craft and examples of its use go back for several hundred years. It seems that people have always wanted to be able to make a machine talk, not only for the direct utility of such a process but because of the recurring fascination with man's most natural and ubiquitous form of communication. The Electronic Paging System (EPS) makes use of the Voice Processor Hardware, which, is a prototype speaker-dependent, isolated voice recorder/synthesizer system. It aims to reproduce, at most, two syllables of speech sound by digitizing and encoding it using Continuously Variable Slope Delta-modulation (CVSD) method. Through the use of CVSD, good quality, low bit-rate speech sound is produced. The hardware component consists of an input and output hardware with a CVSD Voice Recording chip which is responsible for recording and playing back the acquired speech sound. The EPS aims to make use of the low bit rate coding of the VoicePro hardware and produce a paging system for the CCs faculty. The Paging system is by nature software material and it was made as a TSR for ease of access by the user. It is very easy to use and all menu driven. This hardware plus software design should contribute much to the CCS faculty's need. Especially when not all secretaries have the time to get up from their seats just to call a faculty member being asked by students. Instead, they can stay in their seats, do what they're doing with the computer and simply invoke the application program when there is a need to call a faculty. The VoicePro system as well as other voice synthesizer systems provide room for future applications such as reading machines for the blind, talking computer terminals, teaching machines and training aides just to name a few. And this one application, Electronic Paging System, is just one proof of how far speech processing technology in the country can go.