The Verbose
Team Members
- Kevin
Voting Statistics
- leaderboard position
- 20
- overall average
- 2.451
- appearance
- 1.842
- completeness
- 2.454
- innovation
- 2.872
- usefulness
- 2.640
- total ratings
- 889
What
So2Speak, at it’s heart, is a text-to-speech tool. However, by using rails to integrate with other web services, it becomes a vital mobile accessibility tool. So2Speak will interface with email accounts, twitter accounts, calendars, blogs, and other services, and prepare an audio clip brimming with information.
Where
- Entry URL:
- http://so2speak.net
- Info / Screencast URL:
- http://www.kevingisi.com/?p=75
How
Application build using Bort - http://github.com/fudgestudios/bort
Plugins:
acts_as_sayable - http://github.com/gisikw/acts_as_sayable
lazy_developer - http://github.com/napcs/lazy_developer
icalendar - http://icalendar.rubyforge.org/
Third-Party Software:
Festival - http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
LAME - http://lame.sourceforge.net/
Dewplayer.swf - http://www.alsacreations.fr/dewplayer-en
This site does not intend to completely replace the need for screen-readers. Essentially, the goal of this site it to collect information that a user might want to grab on a regular basis, and make it very easily accessible. In the future, I’ll be looking at integrating this with Asterisk, to provide a telephone interface to a users’ feeds. Certainly screen-readers are invaluable, but this site tries to eliminate some of the configuration you need to do to access the information you want on a regular basis.
I like what you have created but it does make me wonder about the usefulness of such a facility for people who a vision impairment. Wouldn’t they be better off using third party software like Jaws or VoiceOver to read webpages and feeds? That way they could configure it how they like it and apply those settings across many different applications/sites.
Thanks flages. I agree. Festival is currently implemented in scheme, and I’m using their text2wav binary to convert an entire string, which doesn’t allow me to add pauses or anything. Once the rumble is over, I’d like to work on building a better interface between ruby and Festival, so I can add things like that.
Very interesting. One thing I noticed, it does not use to do a small pause when starting a new paragraph. That would be good for better comprehension.
Yep, that’s a problem with the Festival application. I’m looking at ways to fix that in future versions. Thanks for mentioning it though!
The speech seems to slow down the further into a passage it gets.