[Sugar-devel] Text-to-speech on the XO 1.5 with 10.1.3

James Simmons nicestep at gmail.com
Wed Feb 23 10:15:23 EST 2011


Read Etexts does do Text to Speech, but on an XO the highlighting of
the words lags behind the word spoken.  The words are spoken OK.
Since Read Etexts works with Plain Text files one thing you could do
is copy highlighted text to the clipboard, save it as a Journal entry,
and use Read Etexts to speak it.

While Speak invokes espeak directly, Read Etexts uses a gstreamer
plugin for espeak that allows things like text highlighting.  Every
version of Sugar should include this gstreamer plugin, but since Read
Etexts seems to be the only thing that uses it it often gets left out.
 You can install it by going to the terminal as the "root" user and
typing:

yum search espeak

That will list everything that has anything to do with espeak.  You'll
see some name that suggests both espeak and gstreamer.  When you have
that name you can do:

yum install that-name

to install the plugin.  Note that if you bring up Read Etexts and it
has a Speech tab visible then the plugin is installed and should work.

If you or anyone else wants to add speech to an Activity the free book
"Make Your Own Sugar Activities!" at FLOSS Manuals has a chapter that
explains how.  This book has been translated into Spanish as well.

James Simmons


On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:58 PM, Dr. Gerald Ardito
<gerald.ardito at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gonzalzo,
> Thanks for your help with this.
> I can see now pasting text into Speak. And I understand about Read Ebooks.
> What the teachers were asking for was for the ability to have text read in
> Browse and Write. The use case would be highlighting text and then taking
> some action which results in the text being spoken by the XO.
> Let me know if you need more detail or information.
> Thanks again.
> Gerald
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 1:35 AM, Gonzalo Odiard <gonzalo at laptop.org> wrote:
>>
>> Read Ebooks activity have text to speech capabilities, and i am adding
>> this to Read activity too.
>> Can you describe what you and your teachers need?
>>
>> Gonzalo
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 9:39 PM, Dr. Gerald Ardito
>> <gerald.ardito at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello all.
>>> I am working with some teachers and students using XO 1.5 and version
>>> 10.1.3 of the software.
>>> The teachers really want to make use of a text to speech functionality.
>>> I can't seem to find out how this works.
>>> I would appreciate any help you can offer.
>>> Thanks.
>>> Gerald
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>>
>>
>
>
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