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

[Martin Sevior]

On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 21:14 -0700, Don Hopkins wrote:
> 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. 
> 

Maybe OLPC can team up Project Gutenberg for audio book production.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project

Cheers

Martin

>     -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  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> 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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