[sugar] New activity: Speak

[Eben Eliason]

Hi Josh -

This is pretty fantastic.  I've enjoyed playing around with it.  One
simple change that I think would add a lot is some color.  More
specifically, the XO uses a two-tone (stroke & fill) color scheme as a
form of visual identity.  It would be great to fill the entire
background in the child's chosen fill color, and perhaps render the
mouth in the stroke color, to emphasize the identity of each child's
XO.  There is an API for obtaining these colors.

Another nice touch would be to make the eyes follow the carat while
typing, instead of remaining focused on the mouse (since, one would
assume, use of mouse and keyboard are mutually exclusive), as though
he were anticipating what he was about to say.  Finally, a subtle but
wonderfully effective technique that a professor of mine often used
for characters with eyes is to periodically return the pupils to the
center of the eyeball.  This creates a sort of dialogue between the
character and the child, as it appears that the he is interested both
in the movement of the cursor and in the individual moving it.

- Eben


On Jan 10, 2008 4:27 AM, Joshua Minor <j at lux.vu> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>    I made a new activity called Speak.  It is a talking face for the
> XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's
> speech synthesizer, espeak. You can adjust the accent, rate and pitch
> of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a
> great way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type or
> just have fun making a funny face for your XO.
>
> I hope you like it.
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speak
>
> Thanks to Arjun Sarwal, Hemant Goyal and Bernardo Innocenti for their
> advice while making this.
>
> Also, if anyone has experience or ideas on how to get access to
> espeak's per-phoneme timing data from python, please let me know.
>
> -josh
>
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