[sugar] New activity: Speak

[Todd Cranston-Cuebas]

Since you're writing out the wave file, it would be nice to be able to
convert existing online material to stored waves that can be retrieved at a
later date to provide "podcast" like capability for listening while
performing some other duty that would not allow you to be hands on. Perhaps
a way to "paste in" content and store rather than have the final result be
short-lived.

Todd

On Jan 10, 2008 12:11 PM, Tom Hannen <tomhannen at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it would be great to combine the features from this and
> TalknType (if I can get it working in Sugar)...
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TalknType
>
> By the way, if you want to look up stuff about mouth shapes for
> phoneme animation, check out "Visemes"
> http://del.icio.us/search/?p=viseme&type=all
>
> Tom
>
>
> On Jan 10, 2008 8:05 PM, Joshua Minor <j at lux.vu> wrote:
> >
> > On Jan 10, 2008, at 11:23 AM, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> >
> > > On Jan 10, 2008 1:27 AM, Joshua Minor <j at lux.vu> wrote:
> > >> Hi everyone,
> > >>    I made a new activity called Speak....
> > >>
> > >> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speak
> > >
> > > This is wonderful, because it will allow children to experiment with
> > > language, not just type in normal text.
> >
> > :)
> >
> > >
> > > In espeak, phoneme sets and orthographies can be added for any
> > > language. Do you support this?
> >
> > Speak calls the espeak command line tool to query the available
> > languages as well as to generate the audio, so any new or changed
> > voices in espeak will show up in Speak automatically.  It does filter
> > out the Mbrola voices because they don't actually produce sound.  I
> > plan to experiment with calling espeak via their API but I will make
> > sure to avoid any limitation on the set of languages.
> >
> > > Can this or the Screen Reader project be adapted to reading content,
> > > such as the children's picturebooks provided in the Library? (We would
> > > presumably need a text file to go with each document.)
> > >
> > > I think that it would be a great boost for child and adult literacy
> > > both if little children could sit on their parents' or grandparents
> > > laps and have the XO read them both a story.
> >
> > XO is the new Teddy Ruxpin :)
> >
> > I was thinking of adding a toolbar tab to allow for some sort of game/
> > story/lesson modes.  It would be cool if someone could write a plugin/
> > extension for a guessing game, story reader, spelling game (ala
> > TalknType) or something like that.  I have also considered wrapping
> > Speak into a reusable component so other activities could add a
> > talking face easily.  I'm not sure of the best way to do this.
> >
> > > In that same vein, would anybody be interested in creating a karaoke
> > > activity? Same-language captioning of Bollywood musicals is claimed to
> > > be the most effective literacy measure in India.
> >
> > That would be awesome!
> >
> > >> 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
> > >
> > > Do you want to do that while running, or would a precomputed table
> > > meet your needs?
> >
> > I would like to get callbacks for each phoneme while the voice is
> > playing, so that I can shape the mouth correctly for each one.  If
> > done well, this could be a nice visual cue to help understand the voice.
> >
> > I would also have to rework how espeak is wired up to gstreamer.
> > Right now I have espeak write out a wav file and then I play that
> > back via the gst module.  I wasn't able to get them piped together in
> > a reliable way.  Specifically when I run espeak --stdout and then
> > attach that to a gst pipeline that starts with an fdsrc, it only
> > works once.  I was not able to restart or rebuild a new pipeline to
> > speak another sentence.
> >
> > -josh
> >
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> >
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