On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 21:14 -0700, Don Hopkins wrote: > 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. >
Maybe OLPC can team up Project Gutenberg for audio book production. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project Cheers Martin > -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] as well, > > where there is a discussion underway about how to improve the > > bookreading experience. > > > > SJ > > > > On 4/19/07, Kumar Pritam <[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 > > _______________________________________________ > Sugar mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/sugar _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/sugar
