Hello, Kumar.
I will write some stuff to the wiki page about the ebook reader, to
describe what I've been working on and where we could take it.
I agree, it would be great to have a voice synthesizer read the text out
loud!
There's a great, fast, small open source speech synthesizer called
"flite" from CMU:
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/
A commercial version of flite and a bunch of voices (and demos) are
available from Cepstral:
http://www.cepstral.com
Cepstral develops commercial quality voices, including US English, UK
English, Italian, German, Canadian French, Americas Spanish, and Woofing
Dog (which is the most universally recognized international language by
far).
The difficult part about speech synthesis on the OLPC is that it
requires a huge amount of meticulous production work to make a voice for
any particular language, and the OLPC is intended to support many
different languages.
I asked how much it cost to produce a custom voice, and they estimated
the production work would cost about $10,000 for an English voice, and
more for voices in other languages (especially if they haven't done the
language before), but less for animals like dogs and cats ;-).
It would be way cool if Cepstral could donate some of the voices they've
developed for other languages, for use by kids on the OLPC!
There are some good free English voices, of course, so we could
certainly ship an English speech synthesizer.
An English voice would be helpful for teaching English, but making
voices for all the different languages the OLPC will support is an
enormous task.
A good low-tech approach for now would be for the eBook reader to enable
recording and playing back an audio voice-over of a real person reading
each page.
-Don
Samuel Klein wrote:
Hi Kumar,
Thanks for the suggestions. If you want to help with development, we
could use help developing xbook / pdf viewing so that runs quickly on
the laptops. Don Hopkins has also been looking into this, and
thinking about a feature wishlist for an ideal viewer. Please add to
the ideas here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Books#Bookreader_features
You might send these kinds of notes to [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> as well, where there is a discussion
underway about how to improve the bookreading experience.
SJ
On 4/19/07, *Kumar Pritam* < [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
Hi everybody,
I am very glad and enthusiastic about this project(OLPC). It's
really a project which is gonna revolutionize the education system
and make it easy to learn.
As far as pdf viewer is concerned, i would like u to consider
adding these functionalities also.
1. Full screen View(no options, just d keyboard interface to
navigate, only contents will be shown on the display)
2. What about "a reader(a voice : text to speech conversion)" to
read the document.
Please let us know more about how can we be more helpful in making
the OLPC projetc a success. It can be anything related to
development or promotion.
Thanks a lot.
With regards:
--
Kumar Pritam
NIE Mysore
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