[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] What's going on with Text To Speech on the XO?

Carol Farlow Lerche cafl at msbit.com
Tue Feb 17 11:48:21 EST 2009


Samuel --
I'd like to call your attention again to
SynPhony<http://synphony.wiki.sourceforge.net/>.
We are close to a base release (probably this week) of a 44,000 word English
word database that has a very rich array of information helpful to the
teaching of English, especially reading.  A 10,000 word Spanish lexicon and
50000 word German one will follow. Norbert Rennert who compiled these, would
like very much to work with other language experts to extend this effort to
other languages.  Some highlights of the English lexicon:  screened from the
CMU Sphynx corpus for accessibility to children, each word entry has
frequency data from analysis with respect to a large corpus of text merged
in, phoneme breakdown (used by reading curricula to decide the order in
which words should be introduced or deemed decodable), etymology, semantic
domain (categorization), IPA coding, syllabification and stress marking.

The second release will merge in many images, though we don't expect to have
a complete image-to-word mapping without a volunteer effort.   We plan to
create an API and a way to define a curriculum sequence for word groups once
the basic database is released, to allow integration of the word bank across
all the activities that are literacy related, as well as create more.  We
also hope to use the word bank to score texts for reading level and assist
in creation of simplified version of extant texts suitable for use by
emergent readers.  Please read our design documents at the above site.

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 01:03, Samuel Klein <sj at laptop.org> wrote:
> > Hemant, Tomeu, Assim and all,
> >
> > Has there been any progress on TTS since last summer?  I'd love to see
> > this project move forward.  Prabhas has also indicated some interest
> > in working on language-learning support, which is directly related...
> > It would also be nice to have Listen and Spell among the regularly
> > tested activities.
>
> Not much, I'm afraid :(
>
> But Aleksey has started a very interesting new path:
>
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-February/011470.html
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
> > SJ
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 4:22 PM, James Simmons
> > <jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> >> Ed,
> >>
> >> Thanks for your response.  I never questioned that there was still
> >> interest in TTS on the XO.  What I was wondering is if there was any
> >> progress made by Hemant Goyal or anyone else in getting the
> >> Speech-Dispatcher software included with the Sugar distribution, if the
> >> newer version of Python that resolved the power management issue was
> >> included, etc.  I've sent a couple of emails to Hemant and haven't heard
> >> back from him.  I was wondering if he was still working on these things,
> >> or if someone else had taken over his work, etc.  He was making RPMs for
> >> Fedora for installing speech-dispatcher.
> >>
> >> James Simmons
> >>
> >> Edward Cherlin wrote:
> >>> Welcome back. There is significant interest from other organizations
> >>> in our use of TTS with text coloring. I have just started discussions
> >>> with the Doug Engelbart Foundation, Creative Commons ccLearn, Alan
> >>> Kay's Viewpoints Research, and OLE about a new project to create a
> >>> full range of teaching materials around Sugar. TTS-TC is important for
> >>> literacy, of course, and also for language learning.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Devel mailing list
> >> Devel at lists.laptop.org
> >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> > IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
> >
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>



-- 
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
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