[Sugar-devel] Internet Archive now supports text to speech with sentence highlighting

[James Simmons]

I just discovered this a minute ago and thought it would be of
interest.  The Internet Archive lets you read a book online.  They
have polished up their online book reader code to the point that it
now supports text to speech.  It highlights sentences instead of
words, and has a nice, human-female-sounding voice that is much more
pleasant than what espeak gives us.

Here are a couple of links to try out:

http://www.archive.org/stream/BigAviationBookForBoys#page/n15/mode/2up

http://www.archive.org/stream/MakeYourOwnSugarActivities/ActivitiesGuideSugar-en-2010.10.08-17.20.43#page/n5/mode/2up

To date we only have TTS with highlighting in one Activity, which is
Read Etexts.  The highlighting lags behind the word spoken on an XO
laptop (although it keeps up on a more powerful machine).  This makes
me wonder if sentence highlighting might be a better alternative (and
also how to decide what constitutes a sentence).  The IA code doesn't
always get it right, but it does OK.

What is neat is that it works on books like BigAviationBook that were
created by photographing page images.  This makes me think we could
get TTS working in the Read Activity.

Anyway, have a look.

James Simmons