I know there are several people interested in having Text to Speech with Karaoke highlighting be a built in part of the Sugar environment. Also, when I originally requested a Git repository for the Read Etexts activity Ed asked if text to speech with highlighting would be supported. I was reluctant to commit to that at the time, thinking it would be too difficult. It turned out to be both easier and more difficult than I thought it would be, but I have released version 4 of the activity which now supports TTS with the words highlighted as they are spoken.
The code could be improved, no doubt. I am fairly new to Python programming. But I think trying out this Activity could give you some idea of what to expect if you attempt to incorporate TTS as part of the Sugar interface. 1). Speech-dispatcher needs to run in a separate thread from the GTK event loop, otherwise the callbacks needed to highlight words won't be received. 2). To get the callbacks as each word is spoken you need to format the text to be spoken as an XML document with tags *before* each word. My code assumes that words are separated by whitespace, which works for many languages but not all of them. I know Sanskrit doesn't work that way, for instance. 3). Espeak does not allways do a callback for each word, and there is no obvious reason why any given word would be skipped. I understand that Festival works better, but I haven't tried it. At the suggestion of Hynek Hanke of the speech-dispatcher project I made the tag ids for each tag correspond to the word number in the document. In this way I can get the tag id in the callback and always highlight the correct word even if occasionally words are skipped over by espeak. 4). Pausing and resuming speech doesn't work. No idea why. 5). The instructions for setting up speech-dispatcher on the wiki are obsolete. You cannot use espeak-generic module with speech-dispatcher and get callbacks. You need to use the normal espeak module. When you try to use the normal espeak module with the current RPMs speech-dispatcher complains of a missing library. So if you want to try my Activity you'll need to use sugar-jhbuild with speech-dispatcher installed and configured to use espeak. Hemant Goyal is working on creating RPMs for speech-dispatcher and will be updating the instructions on the wiki. The Activity page is: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts James Simmons _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
