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Re: How do you read Mathematica?

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  Re: How do you read Mathematica? Murray Eisenberg <murray@math.umass.edu> - 2011-05-10 05:00 +0000
    Re: How do you read Mathematica? Wolfgang Windsteiger <Wolfgang.Windsteiger@risc.jku.at> - 2011-05-12 08:33 +0000
      Re: How do you read Mathematica? Helen Read <readhpr@gmail.com> - 2011-05-13 10:30 +0000
        Re: How do you read Mathematica? Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> - 2011-05-14 07:13 +0000

#2259 — Re: How do you read Mathematica?

"Plain English" may not be so simple to implement, as it will have to 
employ a lot of heuristics that humans are good at!

BTW, on the Mac, when Mathematica speaks the symbol 'a', it sounds like 
the indefinite article is pronounced as in "a dog". I didn't check that 
on a Windows PC yet.


On 5/9/2011 8:20 PM, Christopher Young wrote:
> On May 8, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
>
>> Actually there is, in a sense, an "official" way to pronounce any Mathematica expression: wrap it in the Speak function (using Hold as necessary) and listed to the resulting sound!
>
> This is really neat and helpful! I got
> Speak[HoldForm[x /. x ->  a]]
>
> to work.
>
> The only improvements might be to have "plain english", such as "x when x is replaced by a" or something like that.
>

-- 
Murray Eisenberg                     murray@math.umass.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Dept.
Lederle Graduate Research Tower      phone 413 549-1020 (H)
University of Massachusetts                413 545-2859 (W)
710 North Pleasant Street            fax   413 545-1801
Amherst, MA 01003-9305

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#2301

On 05/10/2011 07:00 AM, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
> "Plain English" may not be so simple to implement, as it will have to
> employ a lot of heuristics that humans are good at!
>
> BTW, on the Mac, when Mathematica speaks the symbol 'a', it sounds like
> the indefinite article is pronounced as in "a dog". I didn't check that
> on a Windows PC yet.
>
Same on Linux. However, in some examples it is pronounced (as desired) 
like the "variable" a. I notice when putting e.g. a comma (,) after the 
"a" then it will not be treated like an article.

Does anyone know, whether language configuration is possible/planned?

If I want to extend Speak in order that my own datastructures 
(expressions) are spoken appropriately, is it the right way to just give 
definitions for Speak, e.g.

Speak[Vec[a_,b_]] ^:= (Speak["The vector with coordinates"]; Speak[a]; 
Speak["and"];Speak[b];)

or is there a lower-level thing to which Speak will refer (like 
SpokenString or Format or something).

I can imagine that in an educational context it could be quite nice to 
have spoken mathematics.

Thank you,
WW.
>
> On 5/9/2011 8:20 PM, Christopher Young wrote:
>> On May 8, 2011, at 11:05 AM, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
>>
>>> Actually there is, in a sense, an "official" way to pronounce any Mathematica expression: wrap it in the Speak function (using Hold as necessary) and listed to the resulting sound!
>>
>> This is really neat and helpful! I got
>> Speak[HoldForm[x /. x ->   a]]
>>
>> to work.
>>
>> The only improvements might be to have "plain english", such as "x when x is replaced by a" or something like that.
>>
>

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#2346

On 5/12/2011 4:33 AM, Wolfgang Windsteiger wrote:
>
> I can imagine that in an educational context it could be quite nice to
> have spoken mathematics.

So far the only use I have made of Speak in the classroom was to show my 
students how to use RunScheduledTask and Speak to scare their roommates :-)

The students really got a kick out of it.

--
Helen Read
University of Vermont

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#2368

On 5/13/2011 3:30 AM, Helen Read wrote:
> On 5/12/2011 4:33 AM, Wolfgang Windsteiger wrote:
>>
>> I can imagine that in an educational context it could be quite nice to
>> have spoken mathematics.
>
> So far the only use I have made of Speak in the classroom was to show my
> students how to use RunScheduledTask and Speak to scare their roommates :-)
>
> The students really got a kick out of it.
>
> --
> Helen Read
> University of Vermont
>

It is quite a different task to have spoken mathematics and spoken 
Mathematica.  The first task is well-explored, and to the extent that it 
can be solved, there are some fairly good efforts, usually aimed at 
visually impaired students.  T.V. Raman's Aster program was one of the 
first, but see this

http://www.snv.jussieu.fr/inova/villette2002/act5b.htm

As for reading Mathematica out loud, there is a simple solution that, 
however, exposes the cryptic nature of Mathematica's syntax.
Simply read out loud the FullForm. That gives "words" for notation like /.

Thus  x/. x->y  is

ReplaceAll[x,Rule[x,y]].

So all you need is a verbalization of [, ], and ",".

Exploring the issue of how one could speak Mathematics INTO a computer, 
is an interesting task.

www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/speakmath.pdf

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