[Qi Hardware Discuss] Bard Storyteller 0.5 for Nanonote

Alan W Black awb at cs.cmu.edu
Sat Jan 21 15:36:15 EST 2012


Bard Storyteller 0.5
http://festvox.org/bard/

Bard Storyteller is a text reader.  Bard not only allows a user to read 
books, but can also read books to a user using text-to-speech.

Bard Storyteller is free software, distributed under a BSD-like license.

Bard depends on CMU Flite (cmuflite.org) for both some general C 
utilities and for synthesis itself.  Bard is targeted at small portable 
devices such as smart phones, not so smart phones and offline devices. 
It uses libsdl (and libsdl-ttf) to display and interact with the user.

see http://festvox.org/bard/README for more generic details, and full 
source.

Bard was written specifically with the Nanonote as the target machine, 
because I wanted an offline book reader and I wanted to have better 
speech synthesis on the device.  There is an Nanonote package available from

http://festvox.org/bard/bard_0.5-1_xburst.ipk

Copy it to you device and run

    opkg install bard_0.5-1_xburst.ipk

There are actually only three files in it which get installed

/usr/local/bin/bard
/usr/share/gmenu2x/sections/applications/bard
/usr/share/gmenu2x/skins/Default/icons/Bard32.png

Its not clear to me if packages should be installing themselves as apps 
for gmenu2x, let me know if this is not the convention.

Although this is a fully functional text reader with text to speech 
support it is very early in its development.  Let me know what you think 
and what you want in such a program.

Things currently on the desired list:

We are working on other synthesis voices to make them fast enough
Audio quality is still an issue, its not as clean as it should be
Smooth scrolling
Screen blanking when speaking or not being used
Other text formats: epub, prc, rtf, html, pdf
Search
Better treatment of text formats (with and without newlines), find chapters
   do some font size/boldness stuff
Support for more platforms
(Cleaner) Support for cross compilation

Alan

Alan W Black                                email: awb at cs.cmu.edu
Language Technologies Institute             http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/
Carnegie Mellon University                  tel: +1-412-268-6299
5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA, 15213, USA. fax: +1-412-268-6298




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