[sugar] Compressed speech for voice overs?

[Alan Kay]

Ivan wrote:
>How is that going to work in terms of translations, and so forth?

Hi Ivan --

I think it will be similar to the problem of text 
translations (one for each language), but could 
be a little easier. We will supply the English 
text of each voice over, so the quick and dirty 
approach could be to just have a native speaker 
translate on the fly. (Also, we'll supply a 
number of these translations done by us ...).

Our initial experiments will be aimed at younger 
children who are not likely to read very well in 
any language, and who might not have enough adult 
or peer help of the right kind.

The voice overs also allow the end-user's 
attention to be focused on the action rather than 
having to look to the side. For things like 
balloon help, etc., we will supply both (and make 
it easy to turn on and off, heh heh).

These are tricky, because the VOs will be very 
useful early on, and then very annoying, etc. Our 
main use will be in various kinds of games and other forms for tutoring.

In any case, we need to find a minimal storage 
solution that is high enough quality. (Among the 
Squeak codecs, there are some that are very 
minimal, but could use higher quality.)

Cheers,

Alan

At 05:28 AM 12/17/2006, Ivan Krstić wrote:
>Alan Kay wrote:
> > I'm not sure how voice-overs will be used in the general XO UI, but we
> > are planning to make heavy use of them, especially in the introductory
> > Etoys projects.
>
>How is that going to work in terms of translations, and so forth?
>
>--
>Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D