Text to Speech / DBus / MT / IBM | Meadan | Google

[Todd Kelsey]

people who would be working on an underlying "accessibility engine" for the
xo may wish to consider an open approach that could connect with a machine
translation engine when it becomes available.

fyi -- an olpc non-profit partner called Meadan (www.meadan.org) is doing
fundamental research in partnership with IBM on advanced machine translation
-- the context is multilingual instant messaging and I am happy to connect
whoever is interested to meadan.

*mt on xo*
it may be possible to adapt mt for realistic use within the xo ecosystem. i
will be chilling with sj on sat 10/27 in cambridge at olpc offices if anyone
would like to chat about this or see the translated instant messaging demo
(i can do this remotely too).

*google MT api*
I also wanted to mention that franz och at google opened up their
statistical MT api and I had been hoping to connect the im client to it --
he is interested in getting "chat corpus" -- IBM is working with the TrIM
client (from MITRE, a gov't thinktank), which can be XMPP -- but progress is
slow -- and I'm wondering if anyone in olpc community might be interested in
connecting the xo chat thing (or an underlying "conversion engine") directly
to the google api. that would be wonderful.

*why meadan*
the role that meadan can play in all this is they have some good approaches
to supplement what franz is doing at google to improve the underlying
quality of mt in a significant way.

*what's the point*
I can't shake the dream of kids on the xo being able to chat with any other
kid, and crossing language barriers -- so i think MT could help with this as
training wheels -- and I hope that it can lead to language learning
opportunities.

On 10/18/07, Hemant Goyal <goyal.hemant at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Eben,
>
> We have been researching about the text to speech synthesis problem for
> the xo, and feel it would be a much better idea to provide the system wide
> text to speech conversion option -:
>
> Would it be a better approach if :-
>
>    - If we allow a user to highlight the portion of text and press
>    "Play" Button that will be provided within the Sugar environment OR
>    - We allow a user to highlight the portion of text and provide an
>    option to choose speak from the right click interface.
>
> Can somebody also point us to code within the sugar environment which
> allows the user to highlight and select the text, that can be piped to the
> eSpeak service.
>
> Thanks,
> Hemant
>
> On 10/12/07, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Devel mailing list
> > > Devel at lists.laptop.org
> > > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
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>
>


-- 
Todd Kelsey
630.808.6444
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