customisable dictionaries

[Quantum Phase]

On the TextAloud forum the topic '32G of Ram' by PHenry suggests that large dictionaries can slow down the response of TextAloud. In practice the built in dictionaries of Ivona voices for example, work pretty well and it is only the failures and homonyms that need correcting. To do this it would seem sensible to disable all entries initially and then enable the problem words as they arise, building a personalized dictionary and removing the excessive load on TextAloud. Is it possible to disable/enable all entries in one go or does one have to go through the thousands of entries individually?

Is it possible to have a free trial before purchase to check out issues like this?

[Percy Henry]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of the entries in any of the Dictionaries being sold. The problem is Jim Bretti's poor coding technique and his choice of encoding for TextAloud Dictionaries that is causing these speed problems. Jim Bretti does not have a lot of respect (if any) for TextAloud end-users.

The only functionality available for TextAloud Dictionaries are those created by Jim Bretti. You can get a feel for the improvements in RC TextAloud Dictionaries by requesting a free update to your RC SAPI 5 Dictionary for non-AT&T US Voices; please keep in mind that RC SAPI 5 only works with US SAPI 5 voices or Cepstral Lawrence (which is a UK voice).

Please make the request for an update to your RC SAPI 5 at support@readtaclearly.com.

[Quantum Phase]

Thanks for the update Percy.

As implied, unfortunately with this dictionary enabled my TextAloud is very slow and freezes for long files (ebooks).

I was particularly interested in the treatment of heteronyms which are included in the RC Sapi 5. Testing with Ivona Joey immediately found errors:

He was lead by a dog

Amy had a row with her first daughter.

The dog liked to be lead by the cat

The road wound for miles

He gave a low bow

Seems as though there may still be work to do on this!

[Percy Henry]

David,

You are a very stupid and malicious person; unfortunately all the intelligent users have quit using the TextAloud forums and the forums are left with people like yourself with a poor level of education attainment (Jim Bretti's profile of the perfect TextAloud user):

You do not even know when to use led versus lead. The other examples you cited are extremely low probability occurrences (The British National Corpus [XML edition] at https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/ has no occurrences of "road wound for miles" or "gave a low bow") and I suspect you spent the last 24 hours coming up with these low probability examples of mispronunciation (which are easily corrected using the template examples in the dictionaries) which a typical reader would not likely come upon in 50 years of using TextAloud.

Why is "Amy had a row with her first daughter." cited as a mispronunciation or SAPI 5 dictionary failure is beyond me.

RC SAPI 5 did not crash your PC. If you loaded a whole book to be read, after I tried to explain to you that the poor encoding choice of TextAloud is very inefficient for large dictionaries, just shows how stupid a person you are.

I do not want you purchasing any of my products and please have the decency of not answering or commenting on any of my posts in the future.

You stupid Jerk.

For an objective evaluation of Read Clearly products, see this evaluation by Dr. Samarth Chidanand, the leading computer scientist in India and the teacher of all of India's I.T. tech billionaires: Dr. Samarth Chidanand Evaluation. Interestingly, these dictionaries are A.I. generated since they are trained on large language modules such as the British National Corpus using regular expressions.

[Quantum Phase]

Percy Do check the Oxford English dictionary for lead. led is the past tense but lead is often used in error in novels and needs correcting.

All of the examples are from my short list and occur regularly in novels and articles.

As to my education I have a doctorate in theoretical physics and am a retired professor.

Throwing such insults is indicative of incompetent ignorance.

If you had any sense you would be working with Jim Bretti and not hurling insults. If the dictionary does not work with large files it is not much use!

Signing out ..... for ever!!!!!

A clarification from Percy Henry:

The dictionary works with large files, the problem is that for files that would require more than about 5 hours of reading, the start time before reading is very slow. So until TextAloud fixes this bug, the recommendation is that you load a chapter or chapters of a book for reading rather than the entire book. Another solution for those of who are technically sophisticated is to setup a RamDrive(Disk) to run TextAloud. I have tried to work with Jim Bretti to provide the most efficient way of setting up a RamDrive for TextAloud users but he has been non-responsive. I cannot fix something that I have no control of; only Jim Bretti can speed up the time before reading starts. Reducing the size of your dictionary to speed up the time before reading starts is not a solution (even a child knows that dictionaries get better with more entries; if the time elapsing before reading starts is so important to you, you could have purchased one of the RC Homographs dictionaries instead of degrading and ruining the dictionary you purchased; since you have no knowledge of regular expressions, I am 100% sure that the dictionary you created is garbage); you need to get on Jim Bretti's case about this issue.

[Percy Henry]

Percy Do check the Oxford English dictionary for lead. led is the past tense but lead is often used in error in novels and needs correcting.

The above quoted text is so absurd, I do not know where to start: I must anticipate that someone is going to use lead incorrectly, change it to led thus depriving the reader the opportunity to catch the mistake through proofreading.


I have a Ph.D. in economics from Fordham University.

If you have a Ph.D. in physics (which I doubt) you know exactly what you are doing and you are a very rude, malicious, disrespectful jerk.