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

[satya komaragiri]

Hello,

> I must admit that I cannot say exactly what this is "useful" for.  In my
> experience, there is at most a very narrow age window in which children
> can spell, but not type.  It would certainly be a very nifty demo, and
> might help us to "engage" users.  Your proposal will have a better chance
> of being accepted if you can give a compelling use case example.

The usefulness of the ability to speak out the spellings is not
limited to the children who cannot type. Take for instance all the
spell-bee competitions. With this facility, Listen and Spell can also
become a practice tool for such competitions. Not just a practice, it
can also be used as a classroom contest by the teachers to make the
spelling learning process more appealing to children. Its more fun for
children to speak it out rather than type and involves the spectators
(in this case his/her classmates) in the learning process too.

Games like 'Hangman' can be implemented. These are all letter based
and the fun quotient and group involvement increases due to voice
input.

>
> My advice is to focus on letters, not commands.  Letters are universal,

[...]

> Note that, apart from the switch in the Sugar frame, this system would be
> applicable to any Linux (or even Linux-like) desktop.

Thank you. :) Your advice is indeed very helpful. I'll try to build a
system along these lines.
>
> Extra credit:
> 3.  Provide an interface for users to record a new set of voices for their
> own alphabet and language.

This should be possible using PyGTK and arecord. (I just checked on my
XO, both arecord and aplay are present by default). I made a similar
tool in Qt for recording my speech samples.

Regards,
Satya