Talk:Speak

Some feedback

Clever!

I'd been wondering if the XO could do speech, and along comes Speak. Perfect. I'd like to use it for the kids' spelling tests: I give it a list, Speak says a word, kid types the word, Speak says right or wrong, and so on. Something to add to the "futures" list?

Another question for you, if you have the time. Is the speech library or API accessible from Pippy? I've only just started wading through the Developers section of the wiki, but I haven't yet come across any documentation on Pippy or speech, and Pippy is something I have a chance of handling.

—Tom 2108 PST 12 January 2008

Nice job! This is fun to play with and extremely cute. I love that the activity speaks the options as you change them. Some minor points:

• The XEyes thing is great, but the distance between the two eyes means that for some screen positions one pupil is unrealistically off-level from the other. I'd recommend using the same y coordinate for both eyes; the average of the y coordinates that you are currently using should work.
• It looks like you're updating the eyes on a timer. I suspect that it might be more CPU efficient to just forward the mouse motion events from the widget's parent, but I don't know enough about gtk to know if there are any obvious drawbacks to this approach.
• The mouth doesn't close all the way at the end of a sentence.
• It looks like you're already aware of the occasional stutters.
• One mouth corner is drawn differently from the other; setting cairo to use rounded path joins and caps might look a little better.

—Joe 00:28, 10 January 2008 (EST)

Thanks for the ideas. I wasn't shooting for realistic eyes, just charming ones, but I do want to make more eye-styles, so maybe Googly and Regular could let you pick between the pupil motions that you describe.

As for the timer, I removed it and replaced it with mouse-motion callbacks in v3. Unfortunately I'm not getting mouse-motion events while dragging the sliders, which was a key feature that I liked. I'll try to re-enable that somehow. I also modified the mouth callback so that it doesn't draw when there is no sound playing. With nothing going on the CPU is nearly 0%.

I'll take a look at the mouth corners issue. I've never seen the mouth fail to close at the end of a sentence, but if I do then I'll try to fix it.

Thanks for the feedback!

jminor 13:38, 12 January 2008 (EST)

Fantastic Application! JoshSeal 15:31, 10 January 2008 (EST)

This is a great idea for a program! My five year old son and I had a lot of fun playing with Speak this morning. As we played my son enjoyed having me write a word on paper then he would type it in and listen to it being read. He immediately wanted to run and show others. We had to retype words to show my husband, and again to show his older brother, and again to show mom......It would be nice to have the word stick around, perhaps a pop-up that shows the last few words/phrases entered that could be reselected. This is a terrific learning to read activity. We also noticed that when entering very large numbers the voice did not read them correctly. Maybe when inputting large numbers the voice could say something like 'oops - I don't know numbers that big' or something to that effect. Thanks for creating this!

I'll see if I can wire up the up/down arrows to let you cycle back to old sentences. I also want the text to stay around while it is talking so you can compare the voice with what you typed. I'm not sure I can/should fix the large number issue at the activity level. I'll see if I can file a bug with espeak about that.

jminor 13:38, 12 January 2008 (EST)