Re: [sugar] New Activity Proposal -- Your voice on XO
Hi Josh, Thanks again for corresponding with me regarding this proposal. I actually have not had a chance yet to get my hands dirty with espeakeditor, or any of the voice-building components in the interface, for that. I do understand that it is something that can be done with a standard PC running a *nix OS, though the memory demands might be an issue. On the other hand, I would hope that hardware limitations at OLPC only become less restrictive with time. And of course, more considerable processing power might be had via solutions like those offered by the OLPC School server project. On a different note, your elaboration of the target end-user groups sums up the topic very neatly! Also, I will be contacting the OLPC group in the Solomon Islands for more on their TTS efforts. Will you be doing any mentoring work during GSoC 2008? Best, Alex On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Joshua Minor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I haven't tried to make a new espeak voice either. It would be great if there were more female and child voices in addition to the existing male voices in espeak. I suggest you give it a try. If it takes a lot of ram or cpu time or just a lot of steps for the user, that may limit the possibilities - or just shape the focus of the project. Your proposal for making voices easily probably appeals to at least three groups. First to educators and developers trying to add new voices for a particular language or country. The second group, is obviously kids who might like to learn about voice synthesis or just have the thrill of customizing the laptop to have a new voice. The final one is the disabled community who would like to use the XO as a tool to help folks communicate more easily. I know that the Solomon Island OLPC deployment is interested in creating voices for the local languages there. ( http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-January/010412.html ) You might want to contact them to see what sort of effort they have made and what parts they found difficult. I built Speak because there was no gui for espeak on the XO. It was a pretty easy thing to make and seems to fill the gap nicely. The more people put effort into the underlying synthesis engine and more ways to access it (like the excellent speechd effort) the more powerful the system will become. Adding more voices will be a great way to expand the appeal of the system. -josh On Apr 5, 2008, at 8:15 AM, Alex Escalona wrote: HI Josh, Thank you for voicing your support! It's great to hear that there is general interest out there for this type of activity. I have to confess that I have not tried the existing process for adding a new voice. However, I am aware of the efforts required to undergo such an undertaking, and hope to make such endeavors more accessible for XO users and their communities. Can you share any experiences or knowledge that you might have on this subject? I understand that you were involved in creating and maintaining the Speak activity on the XO. As well, I have noted some interest in this proposal on the devel list (e.g., http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-February/011076.html). And of course, I know that Hemant Goyal has done considerable work in forwarding Speechd on the XO as a speech synthesis interface, as well as advancing efforts in TTS in general. Best, Alex On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Joshua Minor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is an awesome idea. A couple of people have contacted me to ask how to add new voices to Speak. It would be great to make this process easier. Have you actually tried the existing process for adding a voice? -josh On Apr 4, 2008, at 5:58 PM, Alex Escalona wrote: Hi Everyone, I just created a page on the OLPC wiki detailing my activity proposal--Your voice on XO http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Your_Voice_on_XO. I hope to develop this activity via GSoC 2008. A brief abstract of my proposal follows. This is a proposal for the creation of a new activity for the XO that would advance localization efforts in TTS development, as well as promote the involvement of the local community overall. Your voice on XO would consist of a long-term, community-based project to build and/or further development of a synthetic voice for the language used locally (for more on synthetic-voice building, see http://www.festvox.org/bsv/p710.html, and http://espeak.sourceforge.net/add_language.html). This activity would entail integrating the voice-building capabilities of eSpeak http://espeak.sourceforge.net/, or perhaps Festivalhttp://festvox.org/festival/, into Sugar on the XO, as well as working to facilitate synthetic-voice building in a classroom, or community setting (for an overall view of how the voice building process might proceed, see http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/emasters/summer_school_2005/tutorial3/tutorial.html ). Your feedback and comments are much
Re: [sugar] New Activity Proposal -- Your voice on XO
HI Josh, Thank you for voicing your support! It's great to hear that there is general interest out there for this type of activity. I have to confess that I have not tried the existing process for adding a new voice. However, I am aware of the efforts required to undergo such an undertaking, and hope to make such endeavors more accessible for XO users and their communities. Can you share any experiences or knowledge that you might have on this subject? I understand that you were involved in creating and maintaining the Speak activity on the XO. As well, I have noted some interest in this proposal on the devel list (e.g., http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-February/011076.html). And of course, I know that Hemant Goyal has done considerable work in forwarding Speechd on the XO as a speech synthesis interface, as well as advancing efforts in TTS in general. Best, Alex On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Joshua Minor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is an awesome idea. A couple of people have contacted me to ask how to add new voices to Speak. It would be great to make this process easier. Have you actually tried the existing process for adding a voice? -josh On Apr 4, 2008, at 5:58 PM, Alex Escalona wrote: Hi Everyone, I just created a page on the OLPC wiki detailing my activity proposal--Your voice on XO http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Your_Voice_on_XO. I hope to develop this activity via GSoC 2008. A brief abstract of my proposal follows. This is a proposal for the creation of a new activity for the XO that would advance localization efforts in TTS development, as well as promote the involvement of the local community overall. Your voice on XO would consist of a long-term, community-based project to build and/or further development of a synthetic voice for the language used locally (for more on synthetic-voice building, see http://www.festvox.org/bsv/p710.html, and http://espeak.sourceforge.net/add_language.html). This activity would entail integrating the voice-building capabilities of eSpeak http://espeak.sourceforge.net/, or perhaps Festivalhttp://festvox.org/festival/, into Sugar on the XO, as well as working to facilitate synthetic-voice building in a classroom, or community setting (for an overall view of how the voice building process might proceed, see http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/emasters/summer_school_2005/tutorial3/tutorial.html ). Your feedback and comments are much appreciated! Best, Alex Escalona (vergueishon on OLPC wiki, IRC) ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] New Activity Proposal -- Your voice on XO
Hi Edward, This is precisely one of the many applications that I envision for such an activity--reading narrative works to preliterate children in a natural-sounding voice that is familiar to them. At the same time, it would be pretty challenging to truly replicate the human voice, both from a software and hardware perspective, though of course that is a very important, albeit ambitious goal of speech synthesis in general. Thanks for your support! Best, Alex On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 4:09 AM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/4/4 Alex Escalona [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi Everyone, I just created a page on the OLPC wiki detailing my activity proposal--Your voice on XO. I hope to develop this activity via GSoC 2008. A brief abstract of my proposal follows. This is a proposal for the creation of a new activity for the XO that would advance localization efforts in TTS development, as well as promote the involvement of the local community overall. Your voice on XO would consist of a long-term, community-based project to build and/or further development of a synthetic voice for the language used locally (for more on synthetic-voice building, see http://www.festvox.org/bsv/p710.html, and http://espeak.sourceforge.net/add_language.html). This activity would entail integrating the voice-building capabilities of eSpeak, or perhaps Festival, into Sugar on the XO, as well as working to facilitate synthetic-voice building in a classroom, or community setting (for an overall view of how the voice building process might proceed, see http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/emasters/summer_school_2005/tutorial3/tutorial.html ). Your feedback and comments are much appreciated! Let's get the voices of mothers and fathers, and grandmothers and grandfathers, too. On general principles, and for reading to preliterate children. Best, Alex Escalona (vergueishon on OLPC wiki, IRC) ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
Re: [sugar] Summer of Code update, meeting tomorrow 2100 UTC
Hi Samuel, Unfortunately I was unable to attend this meeting. Is there a log available of the discussion that took place? I am a prospective student of GSoC 2008 and am very interested in the mentorship offered by the OLPC association. Please find below a link to my introductory post: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/011978.html Best, Alex Escalona On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 7:48 PM, Samuel Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear all, We are participating in Google Summer of Code again this year, and now accepting applications from mentors. We are holding the first of a series of quick discussions about SoC tomorrow (saturday) at 2100 UTC / 1700 EST in #olpc. Please join us to share advice to share from SoC's past, find out about applying to be a mentor or student, or to satisfy your curiosity. GSoC is a particularly good way for local groups working on cool software in different countries to get involved intensely in OLPC work over the summer; you don't have to travel to participate, and members of existing teams can apply to take up a specific project under an OLPC mentor. There will be a SoC mailing list for people who want to discuss details (which the accepted mentors and interns can use to discuss their work); I'll post again when that is set up. In the meantime, if you know people who * are working at or with a school using XOs in the classroom * have been working on XO-related development, or have submitted a project proposal in the past * are currently thinking about how to promote OLPC or support its mission in their part of the world, * have been actively involved in your neighborhood OLPC interest group, Please encourage them to apply to either mentor (if they have skills and time to help students develop their own ideas) or be a GSoC student (if they have a software / activity idea of their own). Mentorship applications are open now: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mentor_step1.html Student applications will be open starting on Monday, for only one week. http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ A few would-be students have contacted me by mail or phone to talk about potential GSoC projects; you are all welcome to do so over the coming week. Cheers, SJ +1 617 529 4266 ps - feel free to translate this into other languages and pass it on to regional mailing lists (or post the translations as well to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
