TDS-4 questions part II

It could be the new msagents work with the new sapi5 engines which comes with XP, not sure yet, the site is not really clear in this.
If so, you could be lucky to have TDS working with the sapi5 too -- i have no XP around to test that out; several months ago the msagents still worked only with sapi4 runtimes/engines.
Maybe you have better speakers now? Other soundcard?
The female voice is the voice of Mary.

I ever posted a link to make online speech samples with an Aussie female voice - unfortunately they don't give that engine free for download; you can hear that sample in the first posting for PE with a link to it. I really think she sounds rather cute.

 

Jooske,

You seem to be quite knowledgeable about the speech thing. I would like to learn more about it and it's functionallity in TDS. Do you have any recommendations of readings that would help me?

Thanks,

dallen

 

Hi Dallen,
the speech technology is mentioned quite a few times here, in many threads.
It's used in msagent, www.microsoft.com/msagent
XP systems are all msagent ready, but have the sapi 5 speech engine installed, while msagent till now and TDS use the sapi4 speech engine: all different technology, both can co-exist on one system, but not work at the same time.
So download all the msagent tts/vr speechengines, including the saopi4 runtimes and the speech engines control panel to disable temporary the sapi5 engine to be able to run the sapi4 speech with msagent and TDS.
Might be in future msagent works with the sapi5 engine too, not all sure about that yet, in which case it could be TDS-4 would be able to work with the sapi5 engine too.
From that msagent page dig deeper for the speech technologies with .NET and all the other new developments, and whatever is there. Very interesting stuff!

 

Question for Gavin.
I use windows ME, in an earlier thread, you were not giving much hope to windows 9* / ME users because of " built in vunerabilities" ( my words, not yours, ) implying that Microsoft, ( all, spit!! ) prefer people to upgrade to XP rather than to supply protection to users such as I . Carrying this train of thought further, does this mean that TDS4 is not for the "likes of me"? or, will TDS4 be our saviour? and protect us, despite the fact that we are only windows 9* / ME users, although Microsoft, ( all, spit!!) don`t give a toss, now that they have our money?

 

TDS as a scanner will go far to protect anyone, and TDS-4 will run on any Win32 platform. Windows 9x users will still get Execution Protection but it will not be as powerful as that in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003. Detection of files and in memory will be exactly the same. NT based systems maybe have new features which are only possible in that environment, but no trojan will be impossible to detect with the standard scan(s)

Thankfully the exploiters who attack MS systems go for the bigger targets. Most users now have XP and there are plenty of exploits in it for them to find.. Simpler terms, long time since I've seen a Win9x specific exploit Win9x on the good site though also by default doesn't have all the services running as in XP, remember 9x users weren't DCOM victims for this very reason.. and partially for the first reason above.

Windows 9x is still inherently vulnerable, trojans can be VXD rootkits on Win9x and very hard to detect by normal methods. STOPPING those rootkits is too hard (maybe impossible) due to the shared memory area where any program can start patching memory and affect all other programs. A protection program would actually have to take control over the entire OS, not just parts of it. A massive job to say the least..

 

Also, its not really a case of Microsoft deciding not to protect Windows 98 for example. The truth is they made mistakes years ago, and to fix them they would need to redesign the whole OS. Not only would this take them a long time, the patch you would download would be a whole new OS, probably a 150MB download

I dont blame them for simply pushing forward common sense says its best to abandon the older code and try to learn from the mistakes back then