Read Etexts now supports Text To Speech

[James Simmons]

Edward,

Ubuntu packages are already available for speech-dispatcher, espeak, and 
festival, so it isn't difficult to set up a demo.  You can use apt-get.  
You would have to modify a configuration file to use the espeak module 
(not espeak-generic) and you would have to start speech-dispatcher by 
hand before doing the demo.  There is a way to get it started 
automatically, but I never bothered to find out what it is.  The 
instructions on the wiki are *close* to being right.  Just substitute 
using the espeak module for espeak-generic and don't bother modifying 
the espeak config file.

Hemant's RPMs will be specifically for the XO.  Having special RPM's for 
the XO is desireable because we don't have a lot of disk space to work 
with and the usual package for speech-dispatcher brings in festival and 
other stuff that wouldn't be needed.  This isn't a problem for ubuntu or 
debian running on a regular PC.

I don't think current speech software is up to saying "wound around the 
wound" yet.  I've tested with with "Thuvia, Maid of Mars", "Edison's 
Conquest of Mars", and "Triplanetary" and I've been impressed with how 
well the software deals with made-up words like you find in science 
fiction ("Dusar", "Ptarth"), but I've also heard it pronounce 
"micrometer" as "micro meter".  For a kid learning to read I think it 
should be OK.  But we have to have realistic expectations.  I would love 
for the XO to sound like Hal 9000 ("What do you think you're doing, 
Dave?") but I'll settle for Colossus The Forbin Project, which is pretty 
much what it sounds like.

I've thought a bit more about highlighting for languages that don't 
split words.  I convert my text one page at a time to SSML, using 
whitespace, but it should be possible to do just the oppposite: accept a 
document already in SSML and convert it to plain text for display.  That 
way actual humans could figure out where the words split.

Hemant was going to create a control panel for speech-dispatcher that 
allows you to set speech rate, voice used, etc.  I was planning on using 
that so I didn't have to provide those options in my Activity.  If that 
doesn't work out for some reason I was thinking of swiping one of the 
toolbars in the Speak activity and modifying that.  Speech-dispatcher by 
default speaks very quickly, which I think is the preference for 
visually impaired people.  I slowed it down quite a bit.  Somehow or 
other this needs to be adjustable.  Plus I need to get pause and resume 
working.

James Simmons


Edward Cherlin wrote:

>>Hemant Goyal is working on creating RPMs for speech-dispatcher and will
>>be updating the instructions on the wiki.
>>    
>>
>
>Is anybody interested in making the Debian/Ubuntu packages? This would
>be one of my favorite demos.
>  
>
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