Re: [seul-edu] looking for program that can read stories

[Chris Hornbaker <chrishornbaker@earthlink.net>]

I pondered making something like this (my mind wonders...). Human voices
are much better for children and others in general. (Could you imagine
a child speaking the way festival does? Egads!)

The problem with using human voices is getting all the words to seemingly
flow without annoying little, oh, hiccups, I guess would be a good word
to describe it.


more below....

On Fri, 9 May 2003 13:10:43 -0700 (PDT)
"Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@reedmedia.net> wrote:

> Has anyone heard of a program that can display a story (or other text) in
> an X window and then optionally follow along by highlighting the current
> word and actually reading it out loud?

None that I know of. At least, none that are F/OSS.
 
> I have been using festival (for speech synthesis) to read text.
> 
> I think it would be fun or useful to have a Perl/Tk script (or other)
> where a child (of any age) can follow along with reading a story.
> 
> It would be timed to slowly scroll through the text (for some adjustable
> reading speed).
> 
> The speech could be turned on and off.
> 
> If off, a word (or phrase) could be selected to speak just it.

Could use X's copy and paste system. Since highlighing = copying to buffer,
you'd only need to check to see if something is in the buffer (check out
xcopy). Within a reader program, you could have a "read all" option, which
would copy N amount of the text into the buffer at a time.

A little applet could handle all this, so you wouldn't really need a full
blown reader/renderer.


> What do you think?
> 
> Does this already exist?
> 
>    Jeremy C. Reed
>    http://www.isp-faq.com/
> 


Christopher Hornbaker              Email: jilks@openschooling.org
Jabber ID: Jilks@jabber.org     http://www.openschooling.org
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