On 10/19/2013 09:27 PM, Israel wrote:
A quick update on some things:
On the SWORD list we have been discussing the Audio feature and Hison
who develops for iOS was explaining that he uses the TTS (Siri) to
read along with his Bible program. He provided a clip (in Chinese)
and it was very natural sounding. I think TTS would be worth looking
into.
AFAIK at present the uPhone has no TTS program (though it may be that
they develop one in the future iterations) however that doesn't mean
we cannot use a TTS that is functional in Ubuntu. Here are a few
links if anyone wants to look at them, and get some ideas, or if
anyone has a TTS they are familiar with that works well. The last TTS
I used in Ubuntu wasn't extremely good at sounding natural (like
Siri), but using TTS would dramatically reduce the download size for
Audio. You could install one package and have a few dependancies and
have every Bible in every language (supported by the TTS) instantly an
Audio Bible. Of course we could even use more than one if it is
needed. I would like to use open source software as much as possible,
but I am open to any ideas about getting a reliable Audio engine in
place. This, at present, is the most interesting of ideas (as far as
size of audio bibles, and automatically being able to listen to any
one of them)
http://www.babelfish.org/tts-free.htm
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/
and,
http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/espeak.sourceforge.net/Top_10_Sites_Like_Sourceforge_Espeak/
though I think some of those a proprietary.
That sounds like a great idea, if we can find a reliable enough voice! I
searched AskUbuntu for opinions on the best TTS software available and
tried a few. The best one I've seen is pico2wave, available from the
libttspico-utils package. It does a really good job. Unfortunately, the
default voice is that of a woman, and I would prefer to have the Bible
read by a man. I couldn't figure out if it is possible to use other
voices with pico2wave. It also supports multiple languages, so as long
as we can figure out what language a Bible is in (in the form of en-US,
de-DE, etc) we should be able to read any Bible in a supported language.
Because of the way the packaging framework for Ubuntu Touch is, we will
need to bundle all dependencies with it, so if we use a TTS in real time
(versus reading the Bible before hand and packaging the resulting audio
files), we will need to package the program with out app. I don't know
how that will affect licensing.
Also, if I understand it, our program should translate itself into
other languages as is appropriate (for the interface), is this
correct, or am I misunderstanding?
Yes, we will need translations for other languages. In code, to
reference a string that is translatable, we use the i18n.tr() function,
like this:
property string testString: i18n.tr("This is a test string to be
translated")
That is all we need to do in code to use translations. However, we will
need to use tools to extract those strings and provide files for
translators to use. But we can deal with that down the road once we
finalize more on an initial UI.
