Speech synthesis

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This article is for collecting ideas and resources for using text-to-speech (TTS) speech synthesis on the XO. There are FOSS recognition packages which run on devices comparable to the XO. We are much more concerned with l10n than is typical. And dialects can be a political issue. But TTS would help with Accessibility. And could be very cool.

Speech synthesis has a set of complex tradoffs of synthesizer size versus fidelity versus effort to localize a new languag. The Wikipedia speech synthesis article discusses software that is available, which includes festival, flite, and espeak.

Espeak is small enough for us to often bundle and covers quite a few languages: ~10 languages currently supported tuned by native speakers. Localization to ten more languages is underway.

Synthesis is essential for accessibility to content by people with vision problems, and will need to be integrated with the ATK library used, as well as literacy training, other uses as part of a GUI. Full localization therefore involves selection of a suitable synthesis system and integration into the ATK framework, along with localization of that system for the particular language involved.

Speech synthesis is usually not a good guide for pronunciation – but it may be better than a poor teacher who has never had the opportunity to learn from a native speaker of that language.