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Hello, Kumar. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
I agree, it would be great to have a voice synthesizer read the text
out loud! <br>
<br>
There's a great, fast, small open source speech synthesizer called
"flite" from CMU:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/">http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/</a><br>
<br>
A commercial version of flite and a bunch of voices (and demos) are
available from Cepstral:<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cepstral.com">http://www.cepstral.com</a><br>
<br>
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). <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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 ;-). <br>
<br>
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! <br>
<br>
There are some good free English voices, of course, so we could
certainly ship an English speech synthesizer. <br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
-Don<br>
<br>
<br>
Samuel Klein wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid5396c0d10704190758k6f738225gb338df48ce960915@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">Hi Kumar, <br>
<br>
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: <br>
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Books#Bookreader_features">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Books#Bookreader_features</a><br>
<br>
You might send these kinds of notes to <a
href="mailto:sugar@laptop.org">sugar@laptop.org
</a> as well, where there is a discussion underway about how to
improve the bookreading experience.<br>
<br>
SJ<br>
<br>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/19/07, <b
class="gmail_sendername">Kumar Pritam</b> <<a
href="mailto:kumarpritam84@gmail.com">
kumarpritam84@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Hi
everybody,<br>
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.
<br>
As far as pdf viewer is concerned, i would like u to consider adding
these functionalities also.
<br>
1. Full screen View(no options, just d keyboard interface to navigate,
only contents will be shown on the display)<br>
2. What about "a reader(a voice : text to speech conversion)" to read
the document.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Thanks a lot.<br clear="all">
With regards:<br>
<span class="sg">-- <br>
Kumar Pritam
<br>
NIE Mysore</span></blockquote>
</div>
</blockquote>
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