hebrew text to speech

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Nov 02, 2009, Dotan Cohen wrote about "Re: hebrew text to speech":
> > 1. Add to Hspell also vowel sounds. This is a harder than it sounds
> > Â  (because we need to know how the vowels change in inflection...), but
> > Â  possible.
> >
> 
> The Morfix website has a Hebrew dictionary with vowel sounds:
> http://milon.morfix.co.il/?q=%D7%A9%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%9D
> 
> Could that information help?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but how could a non-free
dictionary help us create free software? Obviously, it's not like we can
"crawl" their dictionary and build our own copy - that would be completely
illegal, as well as immoral.

For those not familiar with what "Morfix" is, "Morfix" is the same company
otherwise known as "Melingo" or "Rav Millim". The project is described in
http://www.melingo.co.il/hb_rav_ab.htm and http://www.melingo.co.il/hb_ab.htm.
It was indeed a monumental project (they claim about 100 person-years), and
it is unfortunate that despite the project benefiting from public funds
(Prof. Shueka and Matach were involved, for example), not even its lexicon
is free, in the sense of free software. This is why we had to create
a similar lexicon from scratch for the Hspell project. It is unlikely
that anything Rav-Milim did will ever be freed (although I'd be very happy to
be proved wrong on this).

Nadav.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Monday, Nov  2 2009, 16 Heshvan 5770
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