Bridging eSpeak and Read activity

[tekelsey at gmail.com]

Sounds groovy.

I think there may be a way to provide an incremental multimodal language acquisition learning and life adventure/activity. LaLaLa?

One of my favorite games is scrabble. We could call it squeak n spell if selchow and righter is not interested in making the world better. 

You can learn letters from scribble. If you already know x language, you can learn your own. Or, more fun, since children do not have preconceived notions about how you're only supposed to learn a single language, they can load up arabic, korean and chinese.

They could play squeak and spell over the mesh with someone, and choose their favorite real or imagined language, or create new languages. They could hear human pronunciation, or gerbil for that matter (think alvin + chipmunks).

For kids in different languages, machine translation is an option, and we're working on making it better (see meadan.org) scrabble is a perfect setting for a limited linguistic set, especially if squeak and spell is helping to provide that vocabulary and grammar.

Squeak and spell could help children to learn and have fun, even if they were blind, deaf or mute.

I would gladly place myself at the service of a developer keiretsu should something come to pass, whether it were squeak, python or treenimation, or a squeaking python slithering up a tree.

-----Original Message-----

From:  "Eben Eliason" <eben.eliason at gmail.com>
Subj:  Re: Bridging eSpeak and Read activity
Date:  Fri Oct 12, 2007 9:53 am
Size:  1K
To:  "Hemant Goyal" <goyal.hemant at gmail.com>
cc:  Arjun Sarwal <arjun at laptop.org>; Devel at lists.laptop.org;Manusheel Gupta <manu at laptop.org>

If we're going to go that far, why don't we make eSpeak a service,
instead of an activity?  The kid could select text anywhere - Read,
Browse, Chat, etc - and select "Speak text" from the contextual menu.
The highlighting is then provided by the child directly, and we gain
the ability to span the entire system with this educational framework.

It seems silly to put arbitrary ties between a few specific activities
for something like this that has so much more potential.  Ideally,
this would go right next to the (hopefully forthcoming) dictionary and
thesaurus.  Heck, we can even add Wikipedia and Google links, if we
want. Creating an environment which is able to respond to children's
inquisitiveness would do a lot for the laptop as an educational tool.

- Eben

On 10/12/07, Hemant Goyal <goyal.hemant at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We are trying to Bridge the Read activity with eSpeak activity on XO. We
> hope to provide a "play" button in the Read UI using which a kid can listen
> to the ebook in their local languages and also learn how to pronounce
> different words.
>
> In this regards, we have 2 queries:-
>
> Pointers within the Evince and Read code from which we can pick the String
> data to be forwarded to eSpeak for Text to Speech conversion.
> We also wish to highlight the words/string of data sent to eSpeak within the
> Read GUI. What is the best way to do that? Is it possible to highlight the
> string within Read or should we use the copy paste highlight features in the
> Evince code?
> --
> Hemant
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>
>
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