New Activity Proposal -- "Your voice on XO"

[Alex Escalona]

Hi Edward,

This is precisely one of the many applications that I envision for such an
activity--reading narrative works to preliterate children in a
natural-sounding voice that is familiar to them. At the same time, it would
be pretty challenging to truly replicate the human voice, both from a
software and hardware perspective, though of course that is a very
important, albeit ambitious goal of speech synthesis in general.

Thanks for your support!

Best,
Alex

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 4:09 AM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/4/4 Alex Escalona <aescalona at gmail.com>:
> > Hi Everyone,
> >
> > I just created a page on the OLPC wiki detailing my activity
> proposal--"Your
> > voice on XO". I hope to develop this activity via GSoC 2008. A brief
> > abstract of my proposal follows.
> >
> > This is a proposal for the creation of a new activity for the XO that
> would
> > advance localization efforts in TTS development, as well as promote the
> > involvement of the local community overall. "Your voice on XO" would
> consist
> > of a long-term, community-based project to build and/or further
> development
> > of a synthetic voice for the language used locally (for more on
> > synthetic-voice building, see http://www.festvox.org/bsv/p710.html, and
> > http://espeak.sourceforge.net/add_language.html).
> >
> > This activity would entail integrating the voice-building capabilities
> of
> > eSpeak, or perhaps Festival, into Sugar on the XO, as well as working to
> > facilitate synthetic-voice building in a classroom, or community setting
> > (for an overall view of how the voice building process might proceed,
> see
> >
> http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/emasters/summer_school_2005/tutorial3/tutorial.html
> ).
> >
> > Your feedback and comments are much appreciated!
>
> Let's get the voices of mothers and fathers, and grandmothers and
> grandfathers, too. On general principles, and for reading to
> preliterate children.
>
> > Best,
> >
> > Alex Escalona
> > ("vergueishon" on OLPC wiki, IRC)
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >  Devel at lists.laptop.org
> >  http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Edward Cherlin
> End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
> http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay
>
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