Re: [IAEP] [Bookreader] Text to Speech readers for XO
The Internet Archive has started to distribute books as DAISY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAISY_Digital_Talking_Book), something we should definitely take a look at. We might also consider leveraging the GNOME accessibility framework to provide book-reading features for Epubs and PDFs in Read - it may be tricky, but the end results would be worth it. Thanks, Sayamindu On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:34 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Bumping up this recent thread on the bookreader list about text-to-speech. Mike and Gregor, in case you haven't seen what's currently possible: I believe James S's Read Etexts uses speech-dispatcher to read selected text. Aleksey and others may have done further work with espeak... I've included some old threads from the Sugar list this past spring below. SJ On Thu, Oct 29, Mike McCabe mcc...@archive.org wrote: I also think this is a great idea. I've worked with several text-to-speech readers recently, as part of my effort to make the Internet Archive books available to print disabled people. They're very useful, and I think that this mode of reading could be of use to a very broad range of users. I suspect we'll see more of it soon. I'm also curious to hear about specific experiences with linux-compatible free TTS, as we may be producing audio books with this to work with the new Library of Congress audio players. Best regards - Mike == [1] old note from James Simmons == ( in repsponse to this speech-synthesis summer of code proposal: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/speech-synthesis ) Chirag, Since you have been working with Aleksey Lim you probably know about text to speech with highlighting in Read Etexts. I wrote the original TTS code that used speech-dispatcher with some assistance from Hemant Goyal and the folks on the speech-dispatcher project. Aleksey refactored my code so it could work with either speech-dispatcher or his own gstreamer espeak plugin. Not only does his plugin need no configuration to work, it also does a LOT better in producing timely callbacks as it reads each word. As you point out in your proposal, highlighting the word as it is spoken is a big part of the benefit of what you're proposing. If all you wanted to do was capture some highlighted text in the clipboard and have it spoken in a voice you can configure in a control panel, that would be easy, even trivial. It's the highlighting that's difficult. When I added speech to Read Etexts I deliberately tried for the simplest approach that would get the job done. It reads only the current page. It always starts either at the first word on the page, or if speech has been paused, it resumes with the last word spoken. You can't choose the word to start on. The Activity itself receives the callbacks as each word is spoken and takes care of doing the highlight and scrolling the textarea so the highlighted word stays on the screen. If I had to write a facility that did what Read Etexts does outside of the Activity I wouldn't know how to do it. It seems to me that highlighting is best done by the Activity itself. I can't deny that it would be useful to have all this work done as you have described without the Activity knowing anything about it, but it doesn't seem feasible. You'd have to have something that could work with gtk textareas, the evince component Read uses, Abiword, and everything else that came along. Another thing you'd have to deal with is PDFs composed of scanned in book pages. There are a lot of these around (the Internet Archive is full of them) and somehow the kid trying to select words on a scanned in page would have to be clued in that these words are not selectable. I suppose you could make an Activity that grabbed whatever text was in the clipboard, displayed it in a textarea, and highlighted the words in that textarea as it spoke them. I'm pretty sure that wasn't what you had in mind. Splitting sentences into separate words will be a challenge. I just use spaces as delimiters and filter out characters like asterisks, vertical bars, etc. That works OK for English but not for other languages. If I wanted Read Etexts to do highlighting on the Bhagavad-Gita in the original Sanskrit it wouldn't work. Even in English I get tripped up by double hyphens (--). It would be nice if Gutenberg etexts put spaces around double hyphens but they don't. It looks like you've picked a challenging project, and I would love to be proven wrong about everything I've mentioned here. Good luck with this, James Simmons == 2: SynPhony and reading assistance == On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.com wrote: I'd like to call your attention again to SynPhony. We are close to a base release (probably this week) of a 44,000 word English word database that has a very rich array of information helpful to the teaching of English, especially reading. A 10,000 word
Re: [IAEP] [Bookreader] Text to Speech readers for XO
Bumping up this recent thread on the bookreader list about text-to-speech. Mike and Gregor, in case you haven't seen what's currently possible: I believe James S's Read Etexts uses speech-dispatcher to read selected text. Aleksey and others may have done further work with espeak... I've included some old threads from the Sugar list this past spring below. SJ On Thu, Oct 29, Mike McCabe mcc...@archive.org wrote: I also think this is a great idea. I've worked with several text-to-speech readers recently, as part of my effort to make the Internet Archive books available to print disabled people. They're very useful, and I think that this mode of reading could be of use to a very broad range of users. I suspect we'll see more of it soon. I'm also curious to hear about specific experiences with linux-compatible free TTS, as we may be producing audio books with this to work with the new Library of Congress audio players. Best regards - Mike == [1] old note from James Simmons == ( in repsponse to this speech-synthesis summer of code proposal: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/speech-synthesis ) Chirag, Since you have been working with Aleksey Lim you probably know about text to speech with highlighting in Read Etexts. I wrote the original TTS code that used speech-dispatcher with some assistance from Hemant Goyal and the folks on the speech-dispatcher project. Aleksey refactored my code so it could work with either speech-dispatcher or his own gstreamer espeak plugin. Not only does his plugin need no configuration to work, it also does a LOT better in producing timely callbacks as it reads each word. As you point out in your proposal, highlighting the word as it is spoken is a big part of the benefit of what you're proposing. If all you wanted to do was capture some highlighted text in the clipboard and have it spoken in a voice you can configure in a control panel, that would be easy, even trivial. It's the highlighting that's difficult. When I added speech to Read Etexts I deliberately tried for the simplest approach that would get the job done. It reads only the current page. It always starts either at the first word on the page, or if speech has been paused, it resumes with the last word spoken. You can't choose the word to start on. The Activity itself receives the callbacks as each word is spoken and takes care of doing the highlight and scrolling the textarea so the highlighted word stays on the screen. If I had to write a facility that did what Read Etexts does outside of the Activity I wouldn't know how to do it. It seems to me that highlighting is best done by the Activity itself. I can't deny that it would be useful to have all this work done as you have described without the Activity knowing anything about it, but it doesn't seem feasible. You'd have to have something that could work with gtk textareas, the evince component Read uses, Abiword, and everything else that came along. Another thing you'd have to deal with is PDFs composed of scanned in book pages. There are a lot of these around (the Internet Archive is full of them) and somehow the kid trying to select words on a scanned in page would have to be clued in that these words are not selectable. I suppose you could make an Activity that grabbed whatever text was in the clipboard, displayed it in a textarea, and highlighted the words in that textarea as it spoke them. I'm pretty sure that wasn't what you had in mind. Splitting sentences into separate words will be a challenge. I just use spaces as delimiters and filter out characters like asterisks, vertical bars, etc. That works OK for English but not for other languages. If I wanted Read Etexts to do highlighting on the Bhagavad-Gita in the original Sanskrit it wouldn't work. Even in English I get tripped up by double hyphens (--). It would be nice if Gutenberg etexts put spaces around double hyphens but they don't. It looks like you've picked a challenging project, and I would love to be proven wrong about everything I've mentioned here. Good luck with this, James Simmons == 2: SynPhony and reading assistance == On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Carol Farlow Lerche c...@msbit.comwrote: I'd like to call your attention again to SynPhonyhttp://synphony.wiki.sourceforge.net/. We are close to a base release (probably this week) of a 44,000 word English word database that has a very rich array of information helpful to the teaching of English, especially reading. A 10,000 word Spanish lexicon and 5 word German one will follow. Norbert Rennert who compiled these, would like very much to work with other language experts to extend this effort to other languages. Some highlights of the English lexicon: screened from the CMU Sphynx corpus for accessibility to children, each word entry has frequency data from analysis with respect to a large corpus of text merged in, phoneme breakdown (used by reading curricula to decide the order in which
