On Feb 18, 2008 6:22 AM, Hemant Goyal [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi,
It s great to see many other developers sharing the idea we have been trying
to implement right within the Sugar Environment.
Yes, thanks to all.
We have been working on integrating speech-synthesis into Sugar for quite
some time now. You can check out our ideas here :
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Screen_Reader
We are also documenting all our ideas and requirements with respect to
Speech Synthesis in this Requirements Analysis Document here :
http://www.nsitonline.in/hemant/stuff/Speech%20Synthesis%20on%20XO%20-%20Requirements%20Analysis%20v0.3.5.pdf
It outlines some of our immediate as well as long term goals wrt
speech-synthesis on the XO. Your ideas, comments and suggestions are
welcome.
I'd like to update the list about our progress:
speech-dispatcher has been selected as a speech synthesis server which will
accept all incoming speech synthesis requests from any sugar activity
(example: Talk N Type, Speak etc)
speech-dispatcher provides a very simple to use API and client specific
configuration management.So whats causing the delays?
I have a few questions. Let's see what the InterWebs tell us.
* How many languages does speech-dispatcher support?
http://www.freebsoft.org/doc/speechd/speech-dispatcher_5.html#SEC8
SD works with Festival http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
English, Czech, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish...
What is the mechanism for adding additional languages? Phoneset
recording, dictionary, and what?
http://www.freebsoft.org/doc/speechd/speech-dispatcher_23.html#SEC82
Develop new voices and language definitions for Festival: In the world
of Free Software, currently Festival is the most promising interface
for Text-to-Speech processing and speech synthesis. It's an extensible
and highly configurable platform for developing synthetic voices. If
there is a lack of synthetic voices or no voices at all for some
language, we believe the wisest solution is to try to develop a voice
in Festival. It's certainly not advisable to develop your own
synthesizer if the goal is producing a quality voice system in a
reasonable time. Festival developers provide nice documentation about
how to develop a voice and a lot of tools that help doing this. We
found that some language definitions can be constructed by
canibalizing the already existing definitions and can be tuned later.
As for the voice samples, one can temporarily use the MBROLA project
voices. But please note that, although they are downloadable for free
(as price), they are not Free Software and it would be wonderful if we
could replace them by Free Software alternatives as soon as possible.
See http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/.
Which in turn says:
Externally configurable language independent modules:
* phonesets
* lexicons
* letter-to-sound rules
* tokenizing
* part of speech tagging
* intonation and duration
That answers most of my technical questions, including how (in
principle, anyway) we are going to support tonal languages such as
Yoruba. Now for organization.
Where should we put TTS projects for language support? Can we create
http://dev.laptop.org/tts? Who should be in charge? What sort of
process should we have for creating projects? Should we just
automatically create a TTS project for every translate project?
speech-dispatcher is not packaged as an RPM for Fedora,
I see Debian packages. Is there a converter?
so at present I am
mostly making a RPM package so that it can be accepted by the Fedora
community and ultimately be dropped into the OLPC Builds. You can track the
progress here : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=432259 I am not
an expert at RPM packaging and hence its taking some time at my end. I'd
welcome anyone to assist me and help speed up the process.
dotconf packages which speech-dispatcher is being packaged by my team mate
Assim. You can check its progress here :
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=433253
Some immediate tasks that we plan to carry out once speech-dispatcher is
packaged and dropped into the OLPC builds are :
Provide the much needed play button, with text highlight features as
discussed by Edward.
Thank you.
Port an AI Chatbot to the XO and hack it enough to make it speak to the
child :).
Encourage other developers to make use of speech-synthesis to make their
activities as lively and child friendly as possible :)
Explore orca and other issues to make the XO more friendly for
blind/low-vision students
Have you looked at Oralux, the Linux distro for the blind and visually-impaired?
http://oralux.net/
We should invite them to join our efforts.
@James : We envision that speech-synthesis will surely get integrated with
Read in due time. I think it would be great if maybe Gutenberg text could be
loaded right from Read only?
I was not planning on anything so fancy. Basically, I was frustrated
that I had a device
