Tony,
Read Etexts does *not* have speech disabled. If you install
speech-dispatcher and configure it to use espeak (NOT espeak-generic)
then it will work. What happens in my code is I try to import
speech-dispatcher python and if I don't find it then I hide the Speech
tab on the toolbar. Hemant Goyal was working on creating RPMs for
speech-dispatcher for Fedora a few months ago, and it may be possible to
do a yum install to get it. It will drag in a bunch of other stuff you
don't need, though, based on my experiences with the RPMs he gave me to
try out.
The reason the Activity needs speech-dispatcher rather than just espeak
alone is that the Python code needs to be called back on word breaks.
That's the only way to do karaoke highlighting, and espeak by itself
won't do it. I would also warn you that the highlighting is not
perfect. Sometimes it skips a word. The way I wrote the code keeps it
from falling behind and highlighting the wrong word, but it will skip
one every so often, at least a couple per page. The folks on the
speech-dispatcher mailing list seemed to think that festival might work
better than espeak as far as these callbacks were concerned.
The other thing to warn you about is that multithreaded Python apps
prevent the power management code from kicking in, or at least this
happened with the version of Python that the XO was using when I wrote
the Activity. This may be resolved now; I can't say. There was some
talk here that a newer version of Python would resolve the issue.
I stopped working on these Activities in late September of last year
when my basement experienced some flooding. It was January before the
mold remediation was done and I was able to go back down there to
program. Also, I wiped out both Linux installs I was using with espeak
and replaced them with Fedora 10, so I don't currently have
speech-dispatcher installed and configured, and it will take me awhile
to remember what I did. I was really counting on Hemant to get SD ready
for the XO, but he isn't responding to my emails these days.
So, in summary, this may turn out to be more of a do-it-yourself project
than you had hoped for. I would dearly love to have Read Etexts used by
kids in Nepal, so be assured that I will do everything I can to help.
If you want to experiment with what I created the best way would be to
get an old computer that runs sugar-jhbuild or use Fedora 10 with the
Sugar packages and install speech-dispatcher. Get that working before
you try using an actual XO.
I've been thinking about Read Etexts ever since Kindle 2 was announced
and I heard it has text to speech built in. I have always thought that
really good support for ebooks would make the XO a Kindle-killer. It
would cost less, be readable in sunlight, give you access to thousands
of free books, and when you get one a kid in a foreign land gets one
too. What's not to like?
Sorry I can't be more encouraging,
James Simmons
Tony Anderson wrote:
Hi,
The educational team at OLENepal would like a 'karaoke-style' text
reader above all other activities on the XO. This is primarily for
English. Looking at the activity code, it looks like the speech code
is there but disabled.
Would it be possible to release a version that supports espeak without
the Speech-Dispatcher pending its implementation in Sugar? This would
give us a chance to experiment with creating 'read-aloud' stories.
Tony
Thanks for your response. I never questioned that there was still
interest in TTS on the XO. What I was wondering is if there was any
progress made by Hemant Goyal or anyone else in getting the
Speech-Dispatcher software included with the Sugar distribution, if the
newer version of Python that resolved the power management issue was
included, etc. I've sent a couple of emails to Hemant and haven't
heard
back from him. I was wondering if he was still working on these
things,
or if someone else had taken over his work, etc. He was making RPMs
for
Fedora for installing speech-dispatcher.
James Simmons
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.laptop.org
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
