[OLPC India] [sugar] xbook : pdf viewer in $100 laptop

[Don Hopkins]

Hello, Kumar.

I will write some stuff to the wiki page about the ebook reader, to 
describe what I've been working on and where we could take it.

I agree, it would be great to have a voice synthesizer read the text out 
loud!

There's a great, fast, small open source speech synthesizer called 
"flite" from CMU:

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/

A commercial version of flite and a bunch of voices (and demos) are 
available from Cepstral:

http://www.cepstral.com

Cepstral develops commercial quality voices, including US English, UK 
English, Italian, German, Canadian French, Americas Spanish, and Woofing 
Dog (which is the most universally recognized international language by 
far).

The difficult part about speech synthesis on the OLPC is that it 
requires a huge amount of meticulous production work to make a voice for 
any particular language, and the OLPC is intended to support many 
different languages.

I asked how much it cost to produce a custom voice, and they estimated 
the production work would cost about $10,000 for an English voice, and 
more for voices in other languages (especially if they haven't done the 
language before), but less for animals like dogs and cats ;-).

It would be way cool if Cepstral could donate some of the voices they've 
developed for other languages, for use by kids on the OLPC!

There are some good free English voices, of course, so we could 
certainly ship an English speech synthesizer.
An English voice would be helpful for teaching English, but making 
voices for all the different languages the OLPC will support is an 
enormous task.

A good low-tech approach for now would be for the eBook reader to enable 
recording and playing back an audio voice-over of a real person reading 
each page.

    -Don


Samuel Klein wrote:
> Hi Kumar,
>
> Thanks for the suggestions.  If you want to help with development, we 
> could use help developing xbook / pdf viewing so that runs quickly on 
> the laptops.  Don Hopkins has also been looking into this, and 
> thinking about a feature wishlist for an ideal viewer.  Please add to 
> the ideas here:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Books#Bookreader_features
>
> You might send these kinds of notes to sugar at laptop.org 
> <mailto:sugar at laptop.org> as well, where there is a discussion 
> underway about how to improve the bookreading experience.
>
> SJ
>
> On 4/19/07, *Kumar Pritam* < kumarpritam84 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:kumarpritam84 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi everybody,
>      I am very glad and enthusiastic about this project(OLPC). It's
>     really a project which is gonna revolutionize the education system
>     and make it easy to learn.
>      As far as pdf viewer is concerned, i would like u to consider
>     adding these functionalities also.
>      1. Full screen View(no options, just d keyboard interface to
>     navigate, only contents will be shown on the display)
>      2. What about "a reader(a voice : text to speech conversion)" to
>     read the document.
>
>     Please let us know more about how can we be more helpful in making
>     the OLPC projetc a success. It can be anything related to
>     development or promotion.
>
>     Thanks a lot.
>     With regards:
>     -- 
>     Kumar Pritam
>     NIE Mysore
>

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