DHES

Here is a request I have never seen before that was just emailed to me...

"We would like to have a computerized voice that says the total at the end of the sale."

Would a speech synthesizer be easy to do in DOS and require less than about 2k of code space to do it? Why would someone need this? What are your thoughts on this?

And people wonder why I open my email by poking it with a long stick.

Dale

Euggh, talking things at the register (aside from the sales assistant) aren't a good idea in my experience. When I worked in retail, when our scales malfunctioned, they spoke in a booming American (NCR) voice "SCALE FAIL!" and then proceed to vocally output their configuration. The only time I could see this being useful would be if the sales assistant was incapable of speaking, and even then - they could just point at the total on-screen.

Mark my words, Dale - implement this and then you'll have people wanting different voices, accents, genders for the voice. Like crazy tax laws.

Andrew wrote:Euggh, talking things at the register (aside from the sales assistant) aren't a good idea in my experience. When I worked in retail, when our scales malfunctioned, they spoke in a booming American (NCR) voice "SCALE FAIL!" and then proceed to vocally output their configuration. The only time I could see this being useful would be if the sales assistant was incapable of speaking, and even then - they could just point at the total on-screen.

Mark my words, Dale - implement this and then you'll have people wanting different voices, accents, genders for the voice. Like crazy tax laws.

I would Have to agree with Andrew on this this would be a mad thing to add.

You could have people wanting diffrent voices for diffrent customer in "Customer Accounts" when ever it gets done.

I would say a big no to this

haha, that's quite a mad request. not to tell that you'll get hundreds of emails requesting for the speech to be programmed in their own language... (i wonder how many languages are there in this world...?)

in case the cashier is mute, i think they should buy a pole display.

Not to worry folks, I have no idea on how I would even begin to do this. This assumes that it can be done at all in QuickBASIC which I doubt.

I just though you would like to see one of the sillier requests I have received for DHPOS.

Dale

I have worked with POS terminals that Talk. The only thing that it seems to accomplish is the clerk pays less attention to the customer and does not provide as much service. When the POS says "Thankyou" every 3 seconds it is especially anoying. I usualy turn of the voice prompts and actually talk to the customer when I work the terminal.

It seems silly... unless you have a lot of vision impaired customers I suppose.

Is it doable in QuickBasic, and in less than 2K? I'd think so, at least if you use an external program. All that is needed is writing some output to a text file and using a SHELL statement to start a program to do something with it. I used to have an old DOS program called TRAN that could read out text files over the internal speaker, and it on an XT you could make out the spoken numbers.

If the program is running under Windows, you could use a SHELL to CLIP.EXE (http://www.insidetheregistry.com/conten ... cleid=1853) to send text to the Windows clipboard. If there is any screen reader active, it will then sound out the text. In whatever voice, accent or gender the user has set as a default. It doesn't need to be Microsoft SAM: http://www.ivona.com.

Wanting a cash register to talk may be a silly request, but I think allowing external programs to handle output can be useful in more ways than one.