[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 12, Issue 90

[Jim Simmons]

Samuel,

Read Etexts originally used speech-dispatcher and technically it still
can.  However, Aleksey Lim wrote a plugin for using espeak with
gstreamer which works better than speech-dispatcher and does not
require the configuration that speech-dispatcher needs.  He also
rewrote the TTS code in Read Etexts so that the Activity can use
either the plugin or speech-dispatcher, whichever is installed.

The gstreamer plugin is part of Sugar on a Stick but does not
currently ship with Fedora or any other distro that I know of.  It is
possible to install speech-dispatcher on an XO running .82 but IMHO
it's more trouble than the results are worth.  The highlighting
doesn't keep up with the words spoken very well.  The gstreamer plugin
does this *much* better.

James Simmons


> Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:04:53 -0400
> From: Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [Bookreader] Text to Speech readers for XO
> To: Mike McCabe <mccabe at archive.org>, Gregor Kervina
>        <gregor.kervina at gmail.com>
> Cc: iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>,    Sugar Devel
>        <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>,      OLPC Bookreader list
>        <bookreader at lists.laptop.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <5396c0d10910291704s7327b26bldb6a6c4c774b06ba at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Bumping up this recent thread on the bookreader list about text-to-speech.
> Mike and Gregor, in case you haven't seen what's currently possible:
>
> I believe James S's Read Etexts uses speech-dispatcher to read selected
> text. Aleksey and others may have done further work with espeak...  I've
> included some old threads from the Sugar list this past spring below.
>
> SJ