Introducing Max TTS
Hello everybody, it’s been some time that I wrote on these lists regarding my plans to build a speech generating device. In the mean time, I’ve spent some effort on the subject and started both configuring a device and writing an application for my purposes. Since I got some feedback on these lists back then, I’d like to share what I achieved so far. Maybe it is of interest for some people out there. The preliminary result is Max TTS https://launchpad.net/max-tts. It initially started as a text-to-speech frontend for OpenMary (thus the name, a pun on the film Mary Max). It soon turned out that, for my purposes, readable on-screen text output is even more important. Max TTS is heavily tailored towards my needs, so there might be some features and polish missing. But I’d like to share my efforts nevertheless, and encourage people to adapt it to their needs. I plan to extend it as required. I currently run Max on a Dell Duo, which is a fascinating device for this purpose: Its rotatable screen allows to write with the screen readable by the person vis-à-vis. But it can also be used on ordinary notebooks or tablets. Feedback welcome! Regards Frederik -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: at-spi2 in Ubuntu P
Am Montag, den 22.08.2011, 13:09 +0200 schrieb Piñeiro: AFAIK, Dasher dependency with at-spi is optional, as at that time a C library to work with at-spi2 was not available. So I guess that for the moment it would be good to create the ubuntu package without that dependency. Agreed. Just yesterday, I compiled dasher trunk on Oneiric without at-spi, and it worked. So would be great if the package could be updated accordingly. Cheers, Frederik -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: at-spi2 in Ubuntu P
Am Dienstag, den 16.08.2011, 09:04 +1000 schrieb Luke Yelavich: On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 01:21:27AM EST, Chris Gregan wrote: Team, The Canonical QA group is meeting in London this week and we were wondering about the movement of Ubuntu to at-spi2. Any information would be greatly appreciated. Oneiric is using at-spi2 already, and its running well. The main driver behind the need for at-spi2 has been unity 2D and its use of QT. I just noticed that dasher in Oneiric still uses at-spi, and therefor conflicts with at-spi2. When trying to install dasher, one has to remove at-spi2 and packages which depend on it, like orca. Are there any plans to move dasher to at-spi2? Frederik -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Build a speech generating device
Hello, a close relative of mine suffers from ALS, a motor neuron disease which leads to the inability to speak as well as general immobility. Since there are only few speech generating devices (SGDs) available on the market, and those are as limited as they are expensive, I plan to build a custom SGD using a tablet computer as a basis and applying available free software components. Since I am not (yet) very much into the field of accessibility techniques, I hope to get some hints from the community regarding the best suited components for this project. The primary components I identified to be necessary are * a virtual keyboard with word prediction * pre-defined text snippets * a speech synthesizer backend (for German language output) * a frontend to the speech synthesizer For the speech synthesizer, I currently plan to use OpenMary[1], since its output quality is significantly better than espeak’s, even with mbrola voices. For the speech synthesizer frontend, I plan to either adapt gespeaker, adding OpenMary support and as-you-type playback, or build a custom solution. The pre-defined text snippets could either be built into the virtual keyboard (as onboard does), or into the speech synthesizer frontend. So currently the field on which I need most advice is the field of virtual keyboards. I tried to evaluate the available options, and there is quite a lot of information scattered across the internet, but for me it was quite difficult to get information about the usability and state of the different projects. Currently, I found these projects which might be worth to evaluate: * Caribou, as the future GNOME virtual keyboard of choice. There was effort to integrate presage as a prediction engine, but I am not sure about the state of this effort. * OnBoard, which is the current Ubuntu solution and for which a branch with prediction support exists. But here too, I am not sure about the state of this branch. * Maliit, as the MeeGo solution, which seems to be quite solid, but prediction support would have to be added (and might also use presage). * OpenAdaptxt, which has a prediction engine as its core, but I am unsure if this is already a usable solution or an evolving project with a mere basis for future development. * Dasher, as a complete different approach. I might be a good replacement for a regular virtual keyboard once mobility decreases to a level where a regular keyboard is hard to handle. But it seems not to be very well maintained, it’s quite unstable and I did not manage to get all of its functionality working I would be glad if someone could give me hints about your impressions as to which of the available solutions is the most usable and matches my requirements. Of course, I’m also happy about any hints and advice regarding the topic in general, about experiences with SGDs, etc. Thanks, Frederik P.S.: I cross-posted this message to gnome-accessibility-list and ubuntu-accessibility, since I am interested in feedback from both communities. I hope this is okay. I am not into project politics, I am just searching for an available solution that can help me achieve what I am aiming at. [1] http://mary.dfki.de/ -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Build a speech generating device
Dear Patrick, Am Samstag, den 30.07.2011, 14:59 +0100 schrieb Patrick Welche: On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 02:22:59PM +0200, Frederik Elwert wrote: * Dasher, as a complete different approach. I might be a good replacement for a regular virtual keyboard once mobility decreases to a level where a regular keyboard is hard to handle. But it seems not to be very well maintained, it???s quite unstable and I did not manage to get all of its functionality working I'm sorry to hear this - please let me know what problems you are having... With the version in the Ubuntu repository I couldn’t get speech output working, and the direct mode was unreliable (only few of the characters were actually passed to the target application). We have already put together dasher running on android writing into talkadroid to provide mobile speech generation (both available from the android market place). The most recent dasher in the git repository (git clone git://git.gnome.org/dasher) will use speechdispatcher or gnome speech if it is installed on your system, and in combination with control mode will speak what you write. Okay, that sounds interesting. I’ll try out the latest code, maybe it already solves the issues I had. Otherwise, I’ll report back. In the documentation for dasher[1], it sais that it’s also possible to speak each word or on stop, not just in control mode. But I didn’t find any way to configure that. (But since control mode already failed, I didn’t investigate further.) I also just found a blog article that describes how to set up OpenMary as a speechdispatcher module.[2] That would probably allow to integrate dasher with OpenMary easily. On the other hand, if I write a speech synthesis frontend for normal keyboard use anyway, I might also just use dasher for text input and leave the rest to that application. I’ll see what works best. Thanks, Frederik [1] http://library.gnome.org/users/dasher/unstable/reallife.html.en [2] http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2011/05/05/speak-to-me/ -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
Re: Build a speech generating device
Hi Justin, (I’m cc’ing the lists, as this might be valuable information for others. Hope that’s okay.) Am Samstag, den 30.07.2011, 09:50 -0400 schrieb Justin Duperre: Hi Frederik - I briefly worked on GNOME Caribou for a senior project in college. I am not sure of the state of presage integration, but what I can tell you is that a lot of work has been done on Caribou lately. In the past six months there have been major contributions to the code. It would definitely be a good choice for your project as the team is very active. Yes, I also saw that in the course of GNOME 3 Caribou got a lot of attention. Since I couldn’t find an official release, I was just wondering how far this is from completion, so that one can actually start using it, and if word prediction was just an experiment or part of the recent development efforts. I have also used Dasher, and I agree with everything you said about it. I think both cover slightly different usage scenarios, so it’d be great to have both available. Are you planning on making this a public open source project? Currently, I’m only doing a bit of research. My primary aim is to use existing and stable software. But the parts I might end up writing myself will be open source. I think primarily of an improved gespeaker, or a new speechd frontend. (Having OpenMary support in speechd will probably make things much easier.) Besides actually writing code, I am planning to document the project, so that others can benefit from my findings and experience. Regards, Frederik -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
