[sugar] New activity: Speak

[Tom Hannen]

I think it would be great to combine the features from this and
TalknType (if I can get it working in Sugar)...
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TalknType

By the way, if you want to look up stuff about mouth shapes for
phoneme animation, check out "Visemes"
http://del.icio.us/search/?p=viseme&type=all

Tom


On Jan 10, 2008 8:05 PM, Joshua Minor <j at lux.vu> wrote:
>
> On Jan 10, 2008, at 11:23 AM, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
> > On Jan 10, 2008 1:27 AM, Joshua Minor <j at lux.vu> wrote:
> >> Hi everyone,
> >>    I made a new activity called Speak....
> >>
> >> 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?
>
> Speak calls the espeak command line tool to query the available
> languages as well as to generate the audio, so any new or changed
> voices in espeak will show up in Speak automatically.  It does filter
> out the Mbrola voices because they don't actually produce sound.  I
> plan to experiment with calling espeak via their API but I will make
> sure to avoid any limitation on the set of languages.
>
> > 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.
>
> XO is the new Teddy Ruxpin :)
>
> I was thinking of adding a toolbar tab to allow for some sort of game/
> story/lesson modes.  It would be cool if someone could write a plugin/
> extension for a guessing game, story reader, spelling game (ala
> TalknType) or something like that.  I have also considered wrapping
> Speak into a reusable component so other activities could add a
> talking face easily.  I'm not sure of the best way to do this.
>
> > 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.
>
> That would be awesome!
>
> >> 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?
>
> I would like to get callbacks for each phoneme while the voice is
> playing, so that I can shape the mouth correctly for each one.  If
> done well, this could be a nice visual cue to help understand the voice.
>
> I would also have to rework how espeak is wired up to gstreamer.
> Right now I have espeak write out a wav file and then I play that
> back via the gst module.  I wasn't able to get them piped together in
> a reliable way.  Specifically when I run espeak --stdout and then
> attach that to a gst pipeline that starts with an fdsrc, it only
> works once.  I was not able to restart or rebuild a new pipeline to
> speak another sentence.
>
> -josh
>
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