<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hello, Kumar. I will write some stuff to the wiki page about the ebook reader, to describe what I've been working on and where we could take it. I agree, it would be great to have a voice synthesizer read the text out loud! There's a great, fast, small open source speech synthesizer called "flite" from CMU: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/">http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/</a> A commercial version of flite and a bunch of voices (and demos) are available from Cepstral: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cepstral.com">http://www.cepstral.com</a> Cepstral develops commercial quality voices, including US English, UK English, Italian, German, Canadian French, Americas Spanish, and Woofing Dog (which is the most universally recognized international language by far). The difficult part about speech synthesis on the OLPC is that it requires a huge amount of meticulous production work to make a voice for any particular language, and the OLPC is intended to support many different languages. I asked how much it cost to produce a custom voice, and they estimated the production work would cost about $10,000 for an English voice, and more for voices in other languages (especially if they haven't done the language before), but less for animals like dogs and cats ;-). It would be way cool if Cepstral could donate some of the voices they've developed for other languages, for use by kids on the OLPC! There are some good free English voices, of course, so we could certainly ship an English speech synthesizer. An English voice would be helpful for teaching English, but making voices for all the different languages the OLPC will support is an enormous task. A good low-tech approach for now would be for the eBook reader to enable recording and playing back an audio voice-over of a real person reading each page.     -Don Samuel Klein wrote: <blockquote cite="mid5396c0d10704190758k6f738225gb338df48ce960915@mail.gmail.com" type="cite">Hi Kumar, Thanks for the suggestions.  If you want to help with development, we could use help developing xbook / pdf viewing so that runs quickly on the laptops.  Don Hopkins has also been looking into this, and thinking about a feature wishlist for an ideal viewer.  Please add to the ideas here: <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Books#Bookreader_features">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Books#Bookreader_features</a> You might send these kinds of notes to <a href="mailto:sugar@laptop.org">sugar@laptop.org </a> as well, where there is a discussion underway about how to improve the bookreading experience. SJ <div>On 4/19/07, Kumar Pritam <<a href="mailto:kumarpritam84@gmail.com"> kumarpritam84@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Hi everybody,  I am very glad and enthusiastic about this project(OLPC). It's really a project which is gonna revolutionize the education system and make it easy to learn.  As far as pdf viewer is concerned, i would like u to consider adding these functionalities also.  1. Full screen View(no options, just d keyboard interface to navigate, only contents will be shown on the display)  2. What about "a reader(a voice : text to speech conversion)" to read the document. Please let us know more about how can we be more helpful in making the OLPC projetc a success. It can be anything related to development or promotion. Thanks a lot. With regards: -- Kumar Pritam NIE Mysore</blockquote> </div> </blockquote> </body> </html>