New activity: Speak

[Hemant Goyal]

Hi Joshua,


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.)


 We are working on a speech-server for providing all these features.
Currently we are considering the api requirements for many activities that
seem to have started using espeak. The speech-server will satisfactorily be
able to handle requirements for speech synthesis for self-voicing
activities, by wrapping the complexities of espeak connections etc. We had
worked on a simple speech-server, however with the evolving requirements of
many developers, we are going to restructure the api before making it
available on the xo.

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.


Hey nice idea!


> > In espeak, phoneme sets and orthographies can be added for any
> > language. Do you support this?
> I plan to experiment with calling espeak via their API but I will make
> sure to avoid any limitation on the set of languages. 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.


We will try and address your requirements of querying for available
languages, callbacks and event info in the api that we will consider and
design in the coming months.

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.


The only thing that I;d like to advise about is that you keep the structure
modular so that once the speech-server is available (with all other
functionality that is required) you dont have to make major changes in your
activity.

Best,
Hemant
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