[K12OSN] new KDE text-to-speech system

[Bill Kendrick]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 08:13:10AM -0600, Rita Gibson wrote:
> I am interested to hear more about this -- has anyone else used this 
> program? We have a few copies of Kurzweil but it has to be installed on 
> a windows machine and it is not very accessible for students, and has 
> been difficult to train teachers to utilize it. (text to speech for kids 
> with learning disabilities). Does this text-to-speech system install 
> with k12ltsp?

I've admittely never set up a K12LTSP system, and am mostly an
'interested lurker' around here. :^)  The default speech backend that KTTS
uses is Festival, which is also Open Source.  It can apparently uses
others, but I don't recall which, and never looked into it further.

The main purpose for KTTS is to help people with vision problems,
but I can see it being set up for use by users who have difficulty
speaking.

Coem to think of it, I can imagine a script being set up (bash or Perl)
which utilizes KDE's "KDialog" to display possible words and collate
them into sentences, so a user could point-and-click (or hit number keys)
to have the computer talk for them.  (a la Steven Hawking's set-up, I guess?)

Or, if it'd be difficult using shell or Perl scripts and Kdialog, a
traditonal KDE app could be put together, or perhaps a Kommander-based
application?  Hrmm!


I'm mostly mind-dumping. Sorry for not answering your _actual_ question. ;^)
Good luck with RealPlayer and KTTS, if you get around to playing with it!

-- 
-bill!
bill at newbreedsoftware.com
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/