Magyar Hírek, 1984 (37. évfolyam, 2-26. szám)
1984-06-09 / 12. szám
ABOUT THIS ISSUE AND THE PREVIOUS ONE Zoltán Halász, the editor of the English supplement of our journal, is spending a few weeks in Australia. It is not a holiday trip, he went to meet Hungarians there, and will certainly bring back many interesting interviews and articles for our paper. The responsibility of presenting the current and previous issues devolved on me in his absence. The Day of Poetry is — traditionally — celebrated in Hungary on the 11th of April. This is the birthday of Attila József the great 20th century Hungarian poet. The highlight of the festivities this year was the inauguration as a memorial of the home, where another poet, the recently deceased László Nagy, was born. László Nagy was a contemporary of ours: several members of our staff had met him. His delicately etched face, his head of hair, snow-white by early middle age, are ever present in their mind’s eye. Our story begins with one of his poems. The title of which became a household word already in his lifetime: Who will carry love to the other shore? For months now we have been publishing a series on the Hungarian housing situation. László Garami went into all the most touchy points of a very delicate situation. He talked openly about the causes, but also presented plans, and what has been done, in consequence of which millions already enjoy living in modern homes. The last article of the series was published in the previous issue: it reported on the ways enterprises help their loyal staff in obtaining a home. We are happy to be able to offer interesting news to people devoted to Hungarian culture. We report on a festival organized for Hungarian folk-dance ensembles in the USA (based on a report in the journal USA). We present the Hungarian Museum of Passaic (N. J.), which does much to help keep Hungarian folk art alive. And, to highlight other things, besides folk art, we are glad to announce that a gala night will be given by some of the bestknown Hungarian artists on the 3th December, in the great hall of the Hunter College, New York. The organizers of the show — prominent American Hungarians — offered the money to be raised by the show for the building fund of the planned National Theatre. The viewers will hear not only words, there will be a lot of music too, classical as well as popular; therefore we heartily recommend the show also to people, who do not speak Hungarian well. We also have to report on a very sad series of events. It is just forty years ago now that the fascist murderers carried off to concentration camps, and exterminated six hundred thousand Jews. Only a few survived the holocaust. The National Board of Hungarian Jew's organized a series of commemorations in their memory. Our reporter was a participant of the Auschwitz pilgrimage and of the Budapest memorial services. After these sad events, we turn to a happier one: yet a new department store opened in Budapest. The Skála Metro department store is situated at one the busiest points of the capital, opposite the Western Station Its glass building is one of the most interesting in the city. The owners of this department store, who experienced an extraordinary series of problems during construction, planned to introduce the latest trading technologies, but the German firm, which was to provide the central computer cancelled delivery at the last moment. The reason was the Western embargo on developed technologies, commonly known as Cocom. So the store was forced to open using the traditional system — but this in no way reduced the buying mood of the Budapest public. Our colourful report is found in this issue. PÉTER JÁNOS SÓS My name: HUNGAROVOX Until last spring, I considered the Linguistic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science an institution of pure scholarship. Fellows of the institute delve into the history, the present and the development of the Hungarian language, give advice in various journals, and over the air and — as I thought — are real scholars to a man. Then I visited the pavilion of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) at the last spring fair the fair of capital goods. A clear, distinct, yet still a bit peculiar male voice greeted me, articulated more strongly than usual, in everyday language: “Dear Visitors! You are listening to the talking machine ... Allow me to introduce myself. I was born in 1982, in the Phonetics Laboratory of the Institute of Linguistics of the MTA. My name is HUNGAROVOX. Did you understand me? I can read any Hungarian text. I also learnt Hungarian grammatical spelling. I transform type-written text into speech. I interpret the most frequent assimilations, end-of-sentence punctuation marks.” Then the machine proceeded to demonstrate how it could speak slowly and quickly, in syllables, suffering from a cold or sore throat, and invited volunteers to play Twenty Questions with it on geography. The machine, the first in the world that speaks Hungarian continuously, and the vocabulary of which is not limited, was born in a two-room laboratory, crammed with instruments, in the building of the Ministry of Education. Its creators are not philosophers. More precisely, they had to become that also because of the interdisciplinary nature of their research. Makers of the invention already enjoying patent rights are: Gábor Olaszi, an electrical engineer, Gábor Kiss, who began his university studies as a programming mathematician, then also studied — and graduated in — linguistics, and Péter Nikléczy, a technician. Readers may wonder why I speak about the HUNGAROVOX as a novelty. Hasn’t a similar contraption been available e.g. in America for quite some time? ... but this one speaks Hungarian and a speaking system of this type could only be built by people knowing Hungarian as their native idiom. Being first in the world must be taken in this sense, Gábor Kiss explained who worked out the computer programme needed for synthetizing speach. “Then you had to start off from scratch?" “Yes, one can say that without exaggeration”, Gábor Olaszi said: “That is that computer literature does not — naturally, since these things are protected by patents — provide the actual recipe even for English speaking equipment. They do not reveal, for instance, how’ they pack 250 words into a single chip. Taking Hungarian speech completely apart, breaking it down to units smaller than the pronounced sounds of the alphabet, finding out and checking how they affect one another when composed, how intelligible speech emerges again from the elementary sounds has meant hard work for many years. Eventually we found that we could produce Hungarian speech to suit from a store, when the computer either processes a given typewritten text for the synthetiser, or produces it in accordance with prepared programmes.” “And the sniffy, croaking voices? Was it worth experimenting with those?” “We did not have to produce these, but were interested in finding out about the mature, structure of such voices, and knowing people, we believed this also would add to the value of the equipment. But I must add, that it was by far not this more or less playful extra, that faced us with the hardest test, as many would think. The most laborious part of our work was to further refine an already relatively good distinctness of the machine.” “While synthetizing Hungarian speech from predetermined acoustic elements is an exciting task in itself, you obviously must also have been spurred by the opportunities of practical application.” “To begin the answer with our immediate field, speech-synthetizing occupies a control role in phonetics. In practical life, it can be useful in the most diverse field. For instance in teaching Hungarian to students, the machine can be used for spelling exercises, counting objectively and patiently by dictating the exercise to which they type the answers. People who tried it — for instance at the international fair — were reluctant to give up their seat to the next person. I can imagine that the machine could instruct workers who often work on different locations, by telling them where they want them as soon as they stamp their timecard, at the start of the shift.” The invention is already in the hands of the future maker. It was purchased by BEAG Electroacoustic Works, which undertook preparations for serial production. Under the agreement, the inventors are obliged to make all further development results available to BEAG. Rezső Karcsay, BEAG’s engineer in charge of product development mentions further fields of application: “Concise verbal instruction can be given to operating personnel of automatic or semiautomatic production lines, by way of HUNGAROVOX. It can work in dispatch centres, control rooms of powerhouses, connected to telex lines, it is able to pass on the message verbally. I can also imagine HUNGAROVOX as a robot guide for tourists.” “Your decision to purchase the invention was made rather quickly. One could say you grabbed it." “Well, perhaps this is slightly exaggerated, since it was not vitally necessary to our business. Compared with the sales volume of education and studio equipment, measuring systems and sound systems used in sports stadiums and conference halls we supply to numerous countries the expected sales of HUNGAROVOX are not really important. But it fits well into our general development aims, since it enables us not only to produce -a bit more quantitatively, but also to assimilate a new technology in our factory. “Is there a possible opening on the export market?" “Yes, it may well become a playful device in teaching Hungarian abroad. We plan to couple the synthetiser with Syster and Varyster models computers of the MTA Research Institute for Computing Techniques and Automatization. But I also consider making preparatory programmes of the most popular Western computers also, provided there will be demand for them.” “How far did preparations for production progress, and when will you take HUNGAROVOX with the emblem of BEAG to international fairs?” “Our men are already working on the prototype, and we should like to present the marketable speaking machine next year.” ISTVÁN BALÁZS 28
