Commercial speech

The federal district court ruled that the statute was not vague, because it addresses an understandable core of banned guns and adequately puts gun owners on notice that their weapon could be prohibited. The Court also ruled that the law did not violate anyone s equal protection rights any burden on those rights was acceptable because the rationality of the link between public safety and proscribing assault weapons is obvious. Finally, under the lesser standards protecting commercial speech under the First Amendment, no violation of free speech rights was found. 

In a decision written by Justice Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal and ruled against the Virginia State Board of Pharmacy. The ruling concluded that commercial speech has some protection under the First Amendment, particularly in relation to the right of citizens to receive information. Because the individual consumer and society in general may have strong interests in the free flow of commercial information, even commercial speech that has an economic rather than a political or artistic motivation deserves protection. Indeed, such information is crucial to the... 

The ruling thus declared the Virginia statute void and prevented the Board from enforcing it. It did not cover all commercial speech. Laws can ban prescription advertisements that are false and misleading or propose illegal transactions. However, they cannot ban truthful information about lawful economic activity without a stronger justification for the suppression of commercial speech. 

Finally, it is interesting to compare NETtalk s skills with the skills of commercially available text-to-speech systems such as DECtalk. Unlike NETtalk, DECtalk uses both extensive (and labor intensive) look up tables that store the phonetic transcription of common and not so common words and sets of phonological rules for words not in its main look up table. While DECtalk performs undeniably better than NETtalk, the comparison is not really a fair one. DECtalk is a combined r sult of many years worth of careful linguistic analysis and codification. NETtalk, on the other hand, is a self-contained. system that (in the span of a few hours worth of DEC VAX CPU time) can learn enough on its own from a set of simple examples to be both intelligible and accurate. 

Although other DSPs were utilized before 1982, it was the introduction of the Texas Instruments TI (Texas Instruments),TMS3 20 series that dramatically changed the environment for DSP algorithm designers. For the first time, an inexpensive, commercially available machine was capable of computing speech and modem algorithms in real-time. 

I give it a six out of ten Have you ever said something like that Most of us are continually evaluating our experiences—as we read the newspaper, as we watch a commercial, as we select a movie to rent, and as we listen to our senator s campaign speech. We listen, we read, and we analyze to make judgments and decisions. In a world flooded with media, we want our youth to be discrimi-... 

Listening to advertising/commercials, political speeches, and debates... 

Analyze a Commercial or a Political Speech. Sammy s dad talks about the power of words to influence our thoughts and actions, so their family makes a game of analyzing commercials or political speeches on TV or the radio. They ask each other ... 

Finally, I discern one more trend of the chemical industry and of its research programs which shall have important influence on market development in the WTO s. The industry has become increasingly aware that many problems of our modem society not only may be solved by the use of chemical technology, but that there may well be attractive profits in such solutions. As pointed out by H. D. Doan, president of Dow, in a speech before the Commercial Chemical Development Association on October 28, 1966 ... 

Technology transfer in the rehabilitation arena is difficult, due to the limited and fragmented market. Advances in rehabilitation engineering are often piggybacked onto advances in commercial electronics. For instance, the exciting developments in text-to-speech and speech-to-text devices mentioned above are being driven by the commercial marketplace, and not by the rehabilitation arena. But such developments will be welcomed by rehabilitation engineers no less. 

Automatic speech-recognition technology may soon be capable of translating ordinary spoken discourse accurately into visually displayed text, at least in quiet environments this may eventually be a major boon for the profoundly hearing impaired. Presently, such systems must be carefully trained on individual speakers and/or must have a limited vocabulary [Ramesh et al, 1992]. Because there is much commercial interest in speech command of computers and vehicle subsystems, this field is advancing rapidly. 

Such systems initially compare unfavorably with TTS in that they require a new set of utterances for each application, compared to a TTS system which would just be deployed once and can be used for any application. Furthermore, the canned speech approach can only say a very fixed number of filings, which can limit the scope of the application (for instance it would be very difficult to speak a user s name). Finally, if the application has to be updated in some way and new utterances added, this requires additional recordings which may incur considerable difficulty if say the original speaker is unobtainable. Despite these apparent disadvantages, caimed speech is nearly always deployed in commercial systems in place of TTS. Part of the reason behind this is technical, part cultural. Technically canned speech is perfectly natural and as users show extreme sensitivity to the naturalness of all speech output this factor can outweigh all others. In recent years, TTS systems have improved considerably in terms of naturalness, and so it is more common to find TTS systems in these applications. There are other non-technical reasons caimed speech is seen as a simple, low-tech solution whereas TTS is seen as complex and hi-tech. The upshot is that most system designers feel that they know where they stand with caimed speech, whereas TTS requires some leap of faith. There may be purely business reasons also while the canned speech approach incurs up front cost in an application, it is a one off cost, and does not increase with the size of deployment. TTS systems by contrast can often be sold like normal soft-... 

The main technical drawback of canned speech is that it can only say a fixed number of things. This can be a severe drawback in even simple applications where for example a telephone number is to be read in an answer machine application. A common solution is to attempt to sphce together recordings of individual words or phrases so as to create new utterances. The result of such operations varies greatly from acceptable (but clearly spliced) to comically awfiil. That said, even the resultant poor naturalness of this is often chosen over TTS in commercial situations. 

RealSpeak The RealSpeak system [108] was another significant landmark in that it was the first commercial unit selection system to be deployed. RealSpeak achieved yet further heights in terms of naturalness, and was showed that unit selection could be deployed in real time commercial systems, proof that practical constraints such as database size and search speed could be solved. Because of commercial acquisitions, today s (2006) RealSpeak has brought together ideas from many other systems, including the Speech Works system (itself a successor of the NextGen system), the Nuance system (a successor of Laureate) and rVoice, described below. 

---