Please address any comments, questions, suggestions or bug reports to jsaccente@eworld.com



Yak is shareware.  If you decide to keep Yak, please send your $10 shareware fee to:



		John M. Saccente

		5403 Mount Royal Circle

		Houston, Texas 77069



  Thank you!!



How to install Yak 1.1:



	If you have Yak 1.0 on your Newton, you must completely remove all three Yak related applications and install the three new ones.  All three have been significantly changed and require the latest versions of each other to work.  Your dictionary data, however, need not be removed.



What's new in Yak 1.1:



	Yak 1.1 features some enhancements and bug fixes to the original version.  Primary stuff of interest:



          %  Yak now supports asynchronous playback of audio.  You now have the option of stopping Yak at any time during voice output (except during the sentence pre-processing period or while reading the time)  You do this by tapping the "sleeping yak face" button in the noteyak app.  While you must remember that this is a Newton, not a BeBox, there is a still reasonable degree of multitasking taking place here - enough so that you can use your Newton for other things while Yak reads stuff outloud to you.  Unfortunately, the Newton only allows one channel of sound playback at a time...so any action you invoke that needs access to the sound chip will cut off Yak in mid-word.  But Yak will pick up with the next word and continue reading the sentence.  *** IMPORTANT NOTE ON ASYNCHRONOUS SOUND : I own an MP100, and previously, the PIE DTS sample code programs Bitchin' Piano, Heavy Metal Disco, etc... which use asynchronous sound playback resulted in nothing but silence on my 100.  The most recent system update I've installed on my Newton is listed as 1.3(414313)p4 (for those who don't know, this number appears at the bottom of the screen from the "prefs" application)  My 100 now handles all sound stuff properly, and I'm going to assume that the system update is the reason for this.  If Yak 1.1 yields nothing but silence on your Newton, check with your favorite Apple software update library for the appropriate system upgrades. ***



          %  There is a new female voice which is significantly better than the previous one.  The Newt Reaper and "lite" male voices have been scrapped.  



          %  There is a new "frequency" option in the control panel.  You may use this to adjust the playback rate of Yak's voice.  Using the frequency slider, you can dial in pitches all the way from satan to alvin the chipmunk.



          %  Yak now takes up less memory (now approx. 211k)



          %  The interface has been cleaned up and improved, and some little bugs have been removed.



          %  Fixed several bugs in the soup handling algorithms which would make simillar words interfere with each other (ex. putting the word "Newton" in the dictionary, then putting the word "new" would previously lead to trouble.)  Plus, Yak doesn't like words in the dictionary of zero or one character in length.  The dictionary editor now has safeguards to prevent these malignant entries from violating its soup.



          %  The NoteYak app will no longer disappear when you open the control panel.  You can even use them both simultaneously if you like.  In addition, the NoteYak app will always remember its location on the screen when closed, and reappear there next time it is opened.  And it now has its own close box.  WARNING!!!  Do not close the NoteYak application while it is still talking!  Doing so will not only cause an error, but may require you to reset your Newton before any of the Yak applications will properly open again.  This is no big deal, but it is quite annoying to have to deal with and certainly worth avoiding.



Yak 1.1.1



      One of the female phonemes slipped into the male phoneme list.  Oops.  1.1.1 sets this right.







  Most of the info in the 1.0 documents that hasn't been specifically addressed here is still valid.





Additional info:



          %  Yak now does a reasonable amount of pre-processing before reading each sentence of a paragraph.  As a result, the actual playback of the sentence is smoother (plus several more important reasons why I did this..), but there is a slight delay at the beginning.  To keep things running smoothly, try to avoid extremely "verbose" sentences.



          %  The Yak packages are stored on the Newton with the following names:  Yak application- Yak:JSACC, NoteYak application- NoteYak:JSACC, Control panel application- Yakcontrol:JSACC.  A preferences frame is added to the system soup ("yakpreferences") - which you should probably not mess with unless you're removing Yak permanently from your Newton, in which case you may wish to use a soup utility to strip this stuff out.



          %  The Yak user dictionary is called "yakdicitonary", and each entry is a frame with a word slot containing the string of the word, and a pron slot with an array of phoneme numbers and a very important terminating 99 value (see Yak programming info.)



          %  Tip for contractions:  if you wish to entry a word such as "I'm" into the dictionary, you'll find that Yak will not recognize the word when it encounters it.  As a temporary solution, if you wish to enter any such words into the user dictionary, you may do so by leaving out the apostrophe... "I'm" can be entered as "Im" or simply "im".  "he'd" can be entered as "hed".  Yak will then recognize the correctly spelled versions of the words as it encounters them.  (in other words, if you have "im" in your user dictionary, Yak will use this pronunciation when it encounters "I'm")



          %  Similarly, you will need to keep numbers separated from surrounding characters if they are to be properly read.  ex. "Windows95" will say "windows", but "Windows 95" with say "windows ninety-five." (not that you should be having your Newton say such things..) "(1234.5)" will say absolutely nothing, nor will "$1234.5" - but "( 1234.5 )" or "$ 1234.5" (notice the spaces) will say "one thousand two hundred thirty-four point five." etc...







  Thanks to Mary for the female voice.

  Thanks to Erik at Allpen for some helpful feedback.





Yak, the Yak control panel, NoteYak and all of the accompanying files in the Yak folder are Copyright )1995 John M. Saccente.  You may freely distribute the Yak folder to any online service, BBS, FTP site, shareware compilation, etc... so long as the folder and all of its contents remain complete, intact and unaltered in any way.  If in the rare case that you should happen to write a Yak-savvy application and wish to distribute any part of the Yak software along with your own, you must include the entire Yak folder and all of this stuff along with it.



Please address any comments, questions, suggestions or bug reports to jsaccente@eworld.com