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 _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
