Voice and filePro

[John Esak]

That is some cool stuff for way back then... but you know what... I like the
sound of a human voice so much better than a synthesized one. And honest to
God, the computers these days are fast enough to look up the word in a small
filePro database and then play the .wav file pointed to by that record.  I
also have a couple records for various "spaces of time" and some  tricky
sutff that seems to emphasize words  like Wow!  Great! and a couple others.
Obviously, I do this with the exlamation point pointing to a separate record
that *says* the word with an exclamatory'ness to it.  :-)

The reading of the bar codes was so cool, but this is infinitely neater.
Actually, the reading of the bar code in human speech was a fantastic way of
"verifying" that the scanner just scanned the label you are looking at.  You
"see" the human readable under the bar code and the speakers in the
warehouse yell them out at you as soon as you scan them.  I can tell you
with two people runningn around doing a wireless  inentory take, it sounded
really, really strange.  Like some sort of auction gone crazy.  After a
while we resorted to just doing a big "ding" for each  verification.  Not
nearly as good, but less nerve rattling.  Still, I'm betting thatr a
mainstream version of my read-the-barcode-over-the-warehouse speakers design
would be a huge hit in certain circumstances. along with this instant
gratification/verification I added the fool proof, fail safe of not ever
counting a barcode that was scanned twice (or more) and it made for a really
great inentory-take system.

Oh yeah, the other cool thing I added to make the whole thing REALLY cool
was little wireless backpack bar code printers.  So, you could replace old
tags, or stick a new specially colored label on tags that were already
scanned.  By glancing around the warehouse you could tell what was done and
not done and the whole job which used to take 8 full hours of about 10
people running around with pencil/paper and yellow gummy sticky lables.
(which were forever coming off)... down to about 2 hours total.... for 4
people!!!!  An amazing, typical filePro enhancement to a business lucky
enough and smart enough to use filePro in the first place.

Of course, by the way, the inventory take scans also updated the real time
accounting system which was also filePro based.  It's such a shame, because
there was a job I lost at a huge army aircraft tooling place back in 1985
because I couldn't do almost exactly what this system does so easily now.

Another sort of funny (yet sad) story that is roughly related to this past
sentence.  I also lost the sale of filePro as the main database to be used
by the Library Of Copngress back in 1984... because... well because when I
asked the gentlemen doing the RFQ how many books would be in the database he
said, "several hundred milllion "  and I believe at the time, filePro could
only store and access 16 million records.  On its behalf though... at that
time, I don't think there was *any* database that  could do more than 16
million records!  Wventually, I believe Informix made the first move up and
started saying a billion records possible... and they might even have been
the ones  who won the contract.  I think Unify moved up to 1 billion records
pretty quickly, too.  And a little  after that, filePro zoomed up, too, as
well as all the RDBMS's  that came after us.  1984 was a hell of a time, but
SO completely primitive compared to today's standards.

John




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kenneth Brody [mailto:kenbrody at spamcop.net]
> Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 1:16 PM
> To: john.esak at 21appr.com
> Cc: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: Re: Voice and filePro
>
> John Esak wrote:
> [...]
> > I did write a really cool spoken word output for filePro.
> It would read off
> > our barcodes in spoken numbers.  Since then I have made it
> read about 100
> > words. I've been toying with it a lot.  Of course, it uses
> the best voice I
> > can find.  :-)  It is verrrrrryyyy slow, but it does actually work.
> [...]
>
> Why not just get one of these?  :-)
>
> http://www.trs-80.org/vs-100/
>
> --
> Kenneth Brody
>