[Gsoc] Summer of Code Proposal: Furthering Speech Recognition in Sugar.

[satya komaragiri]

Hello,

I am a final year student from India. I wish to apply to GSoC this
year by building upon my current work. I had discussed the feasibility
and advantages of having Speech Recognition for an OLPC with the devel
list [1] in September 2008 and have been working on it since then as a
part of the Sarai Fellowship. My progress on that project can be
tracked on its wiki page [2]. I am also working on a dictation
activity under it though it might take some time as I am currently
gathering the speech corpus spoken by children.

This summer, I would like to implement a generic speech library that
could be used by any activity so that children can interact with Sugar
using voice rather than typing. I spoke to Mr. Assim Deodia(cc'ed in
this mail) who developed an activity called 'Listen and Spell' in GSoC
last year and is interested in this idea.

I can showcase one of its potential usages by integrating speech
capabilities to the 'Listen and Spell' activity where the child can
spell out the word verbally. I want to let the children speak out the
spelling rather than type it out. As the alphabet of any language is
limited (26 in the case of English, extension to any language would
just mean getting a few people to read out the alphabet of that
language).

Having a generic library will make system-wide integration easier by
abstracting the interactions with the speech engine via DBUS etc.  All
the activities can use the speech capability as they see fit  (spoken
commands to control the activity is the most straightforward
application that strikes me).

It would be really nice if the community could provide us with some
feedback on this proposal. :)



Regards
Satya Komaragiri

[1] Dicsussion on the devel list:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/019136.html
[2] Speech recognition project page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speech_to_Text