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Re: text to speech (was Re: [school-discuss] idea)



Hello,
> My goal would be to develop a system
> whereby teachers can plug in worksheets and easily convert them to
> speakable online text.
>
Could eBook-speaker be something for you?
http://jlemmens.nl
Kind regards,
Dirk

marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Laura,
Thank you so much for going through and explaining that
information!! Personally, I am not a script writer . . . only a script
borrower. This is very helpful.
My goal would be to develop a system
whereby teachers can plug in worksheets and easily convert them to
speakable online text. Hmmmm . . . . Marilyn
On 27.09.2012
09:33am, LM wrote:
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 8:16 AM,
<marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is the best embedded
text-to-speech feature I have seen . . .
https://sample.stemscopes.com/scopes/203 [1] This is a STEMscopes sample
page. The voice quality is so good I thought it was audio at first. I
believe it was written by their webmaster consultant dude. He also
writes phone apps. Not open source though.
I didn't try logging in,
but just looking at the login page (which I
was redirected to), my
guess is the support is probably done mainly in
JavaScript and more
specificly with the jQuery library. If you do
view source on the login
page, you see references to
/javascripts/jwplayer.js,
/javascripts/jwplayer.js, etc. If you take
the link and repoint it to
the JavaScript files, for instance
https://sample.stemscopes.com/javascripts/jwplayer.js , you can indeed
view the source code. So while this may not be an Open Source project
(it may be copyrighted), if it's in JavaScript, the code is typically
accessible.
I am personally not a big fan of jQuery. (I prefer
standard
JavaScript language syntax to its coding style and I prefer
writing
things myself.) However, a lot of people use jQuery because
it
provides commonly needed functions and it's tested on a wide
variety
of platforms. There are quite a lot of plugins for jQuery to
handle
various tasks such as multimedia (
http://archive.plugins.jquery.com/
).

Here are a couple of
plugins that try to handle multimedia in a
cross-browser friendly
way:
http://jquery.malsup.com/media/
http://www.jplayer.org/

My
first guess would be that any JavaScript code to playback text to
speech would still need a text to speech converter program (like
espeak, festival, flite, etc.) on the server to generate the audio to
play back.
Doing some search, looks like that isn't necessarily
always the case:
http://syntensity.com/static/espeak.html

https://github.com/mattytemple/speak-js#readme
Someone's actually
converted the C/C++ code to bitcode using LLVM (
https://github.com/kripken/emscripten ) and then the bitcode can be
run directly using JavaScript on the client side. So, a program like
espeak can be converted from C/C++ to JavaScript.
Looking at some
of the Drupal based solutions, they look fairly
similar. According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeTTS , FreeTTS
is using flite
rewritten in Java. If it's running client side, it
would require
downloading Java and a browser that could handle Java
applets. If it's
running server side, then any text to speech
converter could do the
same job. Here's another Drupal module that
appears to use espeak:

http://drupal.org/project/1215214/git-instructions
Not sure exactly
what technique
https://sample.stemscopes.com/scopes/203 is using, but
if you view the
source of the page, you should be able to come up with
some good clues
as to what libraries it's using. It does look like
Open Source
libraries are available to do these types of tasks.


The big problem with these types of solutions is that they require a
browser that can handle client side code (in the cases mentioned,
JavaScript or Java applets). Some Open Source browsers don't support
it and some users turn JavaScript off as it can be an added security
risk. Java's less likely to be available on a system than JavaScript
is and licensing may be an issue for Open Source users going forward.
(Same could go for alternatives like Silverlight or Flash.) The Free
Software Foundation is trying to get JavaScript licensed (
http://www.fsf.org/news/announcing-js-labels ) and wants browsers that
won't run JavaScript unless it's properly licensed. (Personally, I
think that's going to be a nuisance for JavaScript code developers and
most sites probably won't bother with it.) Even if JavaScript is
supported, audio support isn't guaranteed in a browser either. I
think
the most accessible method is typically the simplest method.
Provide a
way to click a link that downloads an audio representation
of the
information. If it's too much to record each web page, then
the
process could probably be automated server side using a
text-to-speech
converter. If the download links are created server
side, they'll be
available on all browsers. If you absolutely have to
have the
information played back in a browsers, one could use
JavaScript and/or
HTML 5 audio tags (and hopefully set it to play back
only on user
request). However, it's still always nice to provide a
link to
download multimedia in case some user has a browser that
doesn't
support that functionality.
Sincerely,
Laura

http://www.distasis.com/cpp
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Links:
------
[1]
https://sample.stemscopes.com/scopes/203


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