[sword-devel] One of those weird ideas....

[Anja Hofmann]

Hello!
Your suggestion sounds really great, not just for blind users, but also
for those learning English or other languages.
peter wrote:
> I would think that it should be relatively straight forward (not being a
> programmer makes all things appear straight forward :-) ) to have a link
>  launch e.g. totem or whatever other pre-existing media player is
> associated with a particular filetype.
>   
Personally, I would add an XML tag to each text passage referring to the
respective audio file.
> The advantages over the existing festival support is the natural voice
> of a recording, the ability to make use of music etc  and the
> possibility to import existing taped sermon collections etc. The
> disadvantage  is obviously the loss of granularity and generality -
> Festival can read each individual verse and could be used to read every
> type of module, irrespective of whether it is recorded or not.
>
> Festival is obviously not available for many languages.
>   
How about mbrola http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html ? 
It's available for many operating systems and they also offer audio
samples on their web site, so you can decide whether the quality is good
enough for you.
The best results in text to speech synthesis could be reached by using
preformatted xml input (VoiceXML,Sable) where you can add changes in
pitch, speed, different voices etc. , but that would be another issue.
Best regards,
Anja Hofmann