My thanks to Ray Foret. This is one of those products
like the Zenith talking VCR that is an example of the glass
being half full. It's a start. We do still own a pair of the
talking VCR's at our house as they still work, but I always
thought they could have done a better job on the voice feedback.
After all, they did the hard part which was putting the little
voice files in place and linking them to digits entered from the
remote control but they should have had a standard output sort
of configuration so it could read previously--set times or the
current clock setting, etc. In other words, it is almost good
and I say the same thing about the HD radio. It is almost good
and hats off to the designers but it is not quite there yet.

	Text-to-speech conversion is not the expensive problem
it used to be so we really should be seeing a lot more stuff
that does this except we don't see much but devices that use a
stored vocabulary. That sounds really good, but severely limits
what the device can say.

	I have some idea what needs to be done when building
hardware and I don't understand why we don't see more
text-to-speech in consumer electronics with the exception of
Apple products.

	I don't know how much RAM exists in consumer
entertainment devices, but memory is much cheaper than it used
to be so I think the problem is one of concept. Developers just
aren't thinking the way a unix programmer might think which is
basically, you build standard input and output and then make
everything use those channels.

	As an example, a VCR or DVR contains a memory buffer
that holds the menu or maybe the listing of how the timer was
previously set. With standard output, the whole buffer dumps to
voice and screen if the voice is turned on. If somebody is
pushing buttons on the remote, the new characters also go to
voice and screen. In other words, you make it all talk without
any attention to each function. Of course, you have to be
careful to keep some things from talking all the time such as a
clock with seconds, but it can be done. Fixing bugs like that is
a lot easier than treating all input, output and control as if
it was something special.

	Anyway, I think I'll wait. It's not there yet.

PATRICK GORMLEY writes:
> Russ that was the review by Ray Foret Jr and that was excelent.  Ray 
> pointed
> out accurately that the mode where you can adjust the tuning rate between
> international mode and u.s. canada mode was not accessible.  To me that's 
> an
> improvement that needs to be made if firmware is updated.  I think
> comparatively speaking it's a.m section is equivalent to the ge super 
> radio
> III and it's real strength is its fm receiver.  hth 73- pat kk3f