New activity: Speak

[Edward Cherlin]

On Jan 10, 2008 1:27 AM, Joshua Minor <j at lux.vu> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>    I made a new activity called Speak.  It is a talking face for the
> XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's
> speech synthesizer, espeak. You can adjust the accent, rate and pitch
> of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a
> great way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type or
> just have fun making a funny face for your XO.
>
> I hope you like it.
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speak

This is wonderful, because it will allow children to experiment with
language, not just type in normal text.

In espeak, phoneme sets and orthographies can be added for any
language. Do you support this?

Can this or the Screen Reader project be adapted to reading content,
such as the children's picturebooks provided in the Library? (We would
presumably need a text file to go with each document.)

I think that it would be a great boost for child and adult literacy
both if little children could sit on their parents' or grandparents
laps and have the XO read them both a story.

In that same vein, would anybody be interested in creating a karaoke
activity? Same-language captioning of Bollywood musicals is claimed to
be the most effective literacy measure in India.

> Thanks to Arjun Sarwal, Hemant Goyal and Bernardo Innocenti for their
> advice while making this.
>
> Also, if anyone has experience or ideas on how to get access to
> espeak's per-phoneme timing data from python, please let me know.
>
> -josh

Do you want to do that while running, or would a precomputed table
meet your needs?


-- 
Edward Cherlin
Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay