[xiphos-devel] Fwd: Fwd: Xiphos text-to-speech dictionary

[M.E.Adams]

Xiphos Devs,

Please let me know if you have been receiving my e-mails and are simply 
not responding do to lack of interest or are impeded by work load.

Thanks,
Mike

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Fwd: Xiphos text-to-speech dictionary
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 10:51:28 -0500
From: M.E.Adams <mea4dev1 at use.startmail.com>
To: xiphos-devel at crosswire.org.

Xiphos Devs,

Hmm, Hard people to get to.

I see by the last date and content of the mail threads for xiphos-devel 
that you might have more on your plate than you wish (i.e. dealing with 
gtk issues). However, I suppose I submit this to see what you say.

I had used chat a few times on this topic and didn't get any bites. 
Probably some how my fault. I am also the guy who used chat to inform 
you of the few bugs that resulted in your last few updates to xiphos on 
Ubuntu (noted here as a sort of weird intro, I guess).

Anyway, Regards and thank you for Xiphos.

Mike


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Xiphos text-to-speech dictionary
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2017 10:24:04 -0500
From: M.E.Adams <mea4rqst1 at use.startmail.com>
To: gnomesword-developers at lists.sourceforge.net

Xiphos Developers,

I have been working with the Festival Speech Engine (latest released 
version 2.4) for the past 9 months on Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 for the purpose 
of developing Text-To-Speech (TTS) capabilities for the ESV bible. I 
have created a dictionary of proper names for the ESV (and probably most 
if not all of KJV) and am working on adding supplemental words not 
properly pronounced by the speech engine as distributed by CSTR (which 
is available from the Ubuntu software repository). My proper name 
dictionary is complete, but I am still reading (and listening) through 
the entire ESV bible to find all supplemental words needing attention. 
To date, my dictionary contains 4800 entries.

As you probably understand, there is no one definitive authority on 
bible name pronunciations. After much research I chose the "New 
Westminster Dictionary of the Bible", Edited by Henry Snyder Gehman, The 
Westminster Press, 1970 as the primary authority for my work. Several 
other authorities were referenced as well. However, the Westminster 
reference became my preferred primary reference for reasons I can 
discuss with, you if you like.

I needed a more capable interface to Festival (and Flite) than the one 
provided by Xiphos. So, I build some tools for myself using the Diatheke 
command-line SWORD front-end Version 4.7 (note that the Ubuntu 16.04 
distribution of Diatheke contains frustrating bugs that they have yet to 
address since my bug report many months ago). My goal was to produce a 
dictionary for the Xiphos application allowing its users to hear (and 
possibly see - I can discuss this with you, if you like) a suggested 
pronunciation for bible proper names. This, with some additional Xiphos 
work, could be expanded to full Text-to-Speech (TTS) rendering of the 
ESV bible. Note that I had to modify the Festival speech engine to 
enhance its TTS capabilities.

I, like you, am interested in this being an open source offering. I 
would be pleased if you would consider including/distributing my work 
from within your Xiphos module repository (i.e. open source with 
appropriate credits). I would be please to discuss with you 
modifications/additions to the Xiphos application to enhance its TTS 
capabilities (i.e. beyond the current "Read selection aloud" capability).

Regards,
Michael (Mike) Adams