On Sat, 30 Jul 2011, Frederik Elwert wrote: > there are only few speech generating devices (SGDs) available on the > market, and those are as limited as they are expensive, I plan to build > a custom SGD using a tablet computer as a basis and applying available
I don't know about the hardware. I knew people who used Texas Instruments chips, but I don't expect they'd include all the German phonemes. > The primary components I identified to be necessary are > > * a virtual keyboard with word prediction OK, the only one I know of is Dasher, which you have found. The inference group have a thing called Tapir, which is designed for on screen text entry like "texting". I don't think it will do all the symbols on the keyboard, but it is at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/tapir/ It didn't seem to be a quick way of getting text in, but for people with low mobility it may have some use. In the book "Beautiful Code" [Andy Oram, Greg Wison, O'Reilly, 2007, ISBN:9780596510046] Chapter 30 "When a button is all that connects you to the world" discusses the software used by Professor Hawking. It claims the download is at http://holisticit.com/eLocutor/elocutorv3.htm although I can find nothing useful there. The search engines take me to http://hawking.sourceforge.net/ and it appears that the download is available as an executable or a Zip file, so I suspect it is Windows only. For prediction there is also Presage http://presage.sourceforge.net/ which is really a library, so could be attached to something else. It does have some wxPython demos, which I can't get working [on Cygwin], though your experience on Linux could well be better. Way back, there used to be a program called reactivekbd, which was a predictive text entry system that could be used from the shell. It seems to be here: http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/usenet/ftp.uu.net/comp.sources.unix/volume20/reactivekbd/ I had that working under Sunos 4.<mumble>, but have not retried recently. The dasher project does have the Tcl/Tk dasher which may still be useful if you can't get the rest to build and work, but that ought to reasonably easy to connect to the HTTP interface of OpenMary. > * pre-defined text snippets > * a speech synthesizer backend (for German language output) I think espeak supports German, but I'm not in a position to comment on the quality. http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ > * a frontend to the speech synthesizer Both OpenMary and Espeak have front ends you can type into. The OpenMary example client is in Java, and there is a Ruby one and a Python one in the repository now. They will need more work for non-Windows: lots of choices for sound on Linux. > > For the speech synthesizer, I currently plan to use OpenMary[1], since > its output quality is significantly better than espeak?s, even with > mbrola voices. I think they are dropping mbrola voices because they need a non-java backend for it, and they mostly have prosody working now. See Msg Id: [email protected] posted to Mary-users on 12 APR 2011. > > For the speech synthesizer frontend, I plan to either adapt gespeaker, I don't know about gespeaker, so I searched, and found this: http://alternativeto.net/software/gespeaker/ thereby finding Kmouth http://www.schmi-dt.de/kmouth/index.en.html which claims to have word completion and a phrase book, as well as history. [The rest trimmed] Hope some of that helps, Hugh -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
