Hi I recieved this mail from indian languages tts developers. Please read it.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: TTS Support <support-...@lantana.tenet.res.in> Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:25:43 +0530 Subject: Re: Comments upon the hindi tts reply To: Shona Man <shonam...@gmail.com> Hi, I would like to tell how we decided to develop this software. For past 5 years we have been conducting training in JAWS (English language) for visually challenged community in Tamil Nadu. Darshini, an NGO,working for visually challenged community in Tamil Nadu are the people who send them for the training at IIT Madras. Nagarajan was one of them 4 years back. He did MA english from MCC. The main feedback that we got from the students where 1) Could not understand American English 2) they wanted a reader in Tamil 3) they wanted English to be spoken in Tamil Accent 4) they wanted a screen reader which will be available for free of cost Most of them were from villages in different parts of tamil Nadu. And they were not regular users of Computer. This is one of the first training they got to learn computer and browse internet. Motivated from their feedback professor Hema Murthy consulted with Indian Govt and agreed on making a software for Indian Languages. So a consortium of 5 institutions were formed to develop this software. IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIIT Hyderabad, CDAC Mumbai and CDAC Trivandrum. We employed Nagarajan in IIT Madras for helping us with the development. The developers were research students of the institute and other project associates from other institutions. We came to know that lot of members in AccessIndia are using NVDA. So we decided to integrate out software with NVDA. NVDA as you said is open source. We developed the Voice. And we just incorporated with NVDA. Half way through the project, we travelled to different visually challenged institutions in different states to get a feedback on the software. Below are the list of institutions we visited. 1) Malayalam at Helen Keller Institute for Visually Challenged, Palakkad, Kerala. We had contacted the organisation in trivandrum, which gave us this address. Their feedback was, they were ready to use this software even if its half way done. They were OK with the system, its quality. They also mentioned it is slow. But they were ready to use it and were happy about it 2) Hindi at NAB Delhi. 3)Marathi at NAB Mumbai 4) Bengali at NAB Kolkatta 5) Telugu at Sai Junior College, Hyderabad 6) Tamil - people associated with NGO Dharshini, Chennai All the feedbacks that we got from them were incorporated. Later after we reached a stage that we thought we can release the software, we conducted training in all these places. Malayalam at CDAC trivandrum, Hindi in Delhi, Marathi in CDAC mumbai, Bengali in IIT Kharagpur, Tamil in IIT Madras and Telugu in IIIT Hyderabad. We still got some more suggestions from these people, which also we incorporated. Rajender Singh Negi from NAB Delhi for Hindi, Priyanka Agarwal for Bengali, Buchi Babu for Telugu, Belram for Malayalam, Harshad Jadhav for marathi and Nagarajan for Tamil were the trainers. They are all members of AccessIndia. In the first phase of project we could not incorporate full support for English. But as there are other english voices available, we decided to do it in the next phase. So we actually did work with a lot of visually challenged community. I know it not the whole of access India. But we got lot of feedbacks from all these people. This whole project was done by mostly students. We are not looking at any profit. It was funded by government. We agree we are not a professional group. But we are trying to make it as usable for you as possible. We appreciate the more feedbacks coming in, so that we can correct them in the next phase. Sir, as you told it is not working with Hindi BBC, Please allow me to help you. When I said compare with NVDA, I meant, compare with Espeak Hindi voice, in NVDA. Sorry if I got it wrong. Now I would like to help you listen to our software. 1) Did you have previous version of NVDA already installed 2) When you switch on this NVDA, it will be speaking in an english male voice - Kal_Diphone. Please change the voice. Got to voice settings. and Press down arrow to change the voice. I think it wont give you a feedback for the name of the voice. Press enter. This is because our voice is heavy and it is taking time to load 3) Please wait for some time till you hear a lady voice. 4) Try some hindi in notepad and make her read it. This is just to verify that the voice is working. 5) Now try BBC Hindi. Please let me know the issues you face. I would like to solve them and help you to listen to our voice. As the second phase of the project we are working on reducing the size, increasing the speed and full support for english. Please bear with us and give us feedbacks, so that we could make this a better software. Please forward this to AcessIndia and let everyone know why we decided to make this software and why your feedback is important to us. Thanks & Regards, TTS Group, IIT Madras, Chennai. On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:53:08 +0530, Shona Man wrote > With reference to ur mail I want to say taht I commented after > testing it. I don’t know how it is reading bbc hindi in your machine > while it was totally incapable to read hindi website in my PC. I > have already 4GB ram in my machine with I5 processor, I don’t know > which 2GB Ram you are talking about! I think the the only way of > maintaining the quality is not to keep it slow! Why are you > referring to compare with NVDA? NVDA is such open source software’ I > am sure, upon which no such dedicated labor and money would had been > incurred! We appreciate the step taken by the govt but what ever is > being made that should be at par of other good screen reader > softwares available presently so that it could have capability to > replace them. Had it been so user friendly so that we would have > been replaced other paid or cracked version of screen reader! I am > not able to understand that only one visually challenged person is > being consulted! Why this fact is being ignored that there are so > many NGOs working in field of welfare of the blind including > developing softwares, like mobile screen readers as codefactory is > one of them. Why other persons are not being consulted? Only the > fact that he is using doesn’t make any sense. > > -- > LL.M candidate > at Faculty of Law in University of Delhi > > !DSPAM:193,4eaae4d9194071496857483! -- Open WebMail Project (http://openwebmail.org) -- LL.M candidate at Faculty of Law in University of Delhi Register for AccessIndia convention 2011(November 12-13) at: http://www.accessindia.org.in/harish/convention.htm Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/ To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
