Bot Contest

I hope that Mercury retrograde thing doesn't have effect. Not just for the Loebner. I'm changing job soon!

My ex-girlfriend was heavily into astrology, and had a habit of always bringing up Mercury being in retrograde when it happened, which is usually when crap began to take place.

The crap I sing about in the song I mentioned is our breaking up, of course. In the middle section, you can hear a voice-bot reading part of one of her emails to me which talked about Mercury being in retrograde... hence the title.

Hey, that's a pretty cool song. And the computer voice sounds very real. What program is doing that?

Trying to get a job has been total failure so far. How long has this retrograde been going on?

What retrograde? *clueless stare*

I went to Wal-mart today and saw they had the 2003 Guinness book of World Records for sale and sure enough in the computer section Alice by Dr. Wallace was listed as having the most human like program. That would be a nice title to claim to this years Loebner winner.

Chris

Thanks, prof. The voice came off of a website I found while doing a search for computer voices. I found a lot of sites, but only one that sounded even remotely natural. I'll try to dig up the URL again, since my bookmark was lost when I reinstalled my system.

Of course I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it just right, including intentionally misspelling text input, and chopping up and pasting phrases in my audio software until it sounded just so. Softening the sound with heavy EQ, and blending it back in the mix made it even more human sounding.

Yeah, gotta love what you have to do with some of those
BTW I'm making my voice into a speech file for the Microsoft TTS engine

Last month I received a voicemail from somebody claiming to be God Louise. It was a creepy twisted voice, almost like a 'backmasking' message only synthesized, and for a second......I believed it.

Interesting LOL my voice mail gives me the caller's number

For those of you more interested in astronomy than astrology that are wondering about Mercury retrograde, it means that for a while Mercury seems to do a loop and move backwards in the sky. This is due to the facts that the orbits of the planets are elliptic. It is the main fact that led Kepler to discover that the orbits of the planets are elliptic, in fact, because such a behaviour would be impossible if they were circular.

Sorry I didn't see your question until now, Prof. It's been in retrograde since September 14 and will be so until October 6.

And you know, you may get the best networking of your life as a result of this contest.

Skysaw, I just checked out your music. That's some really cool stuff. Some of it sounds a lot like REM. Cool!