Originally Read Etexts used speech-dispatcher to do what the gstreamer plugin does. On a fast computer it sounds really awful, like HAL 9000 developing a stutter towards the end of being deactivated. If you do, don't feel bad because I thought that too. You might think that you could achieve these objectives by running espeak on one word at a time. We needed to highlight the words being spoken as they are spoken.We needed to be able to pause and resume speech, because the Activity needs to speak a whole page worth of text, not just simple phrases.For this application we needed to be able to do things that are not possible by just running espeak. The gstreamer plugin is what is used by Read Etexts to do text to speech with highlighting. If your Activity needs to run on something other than the latest version of Sugar this will be something to consider. Its big advantage is that you do not need to have the gstreamer plugin installed. Executing espeak is definitely the simplest method, and may be suitable for your own Activity. For what Speak is doing using the gstreamer plugin isn't really needed). (Technically, Speak uses the gstreamer plugin if it is available, and otherwise executes espeak directly. They are:īoth approaches have their advantages. If your Activity could benefit from having words spoken out loud (the possibilities for educational Activities and games are definitely there) this chapter will teach you how to make it happen.Ī couple of ways, actually, and neither one is that painful.

You might be surprised to learn how little of the code in that Activity is used to get the words spoken. Certainly one of the most popular Activities available is Speak, which takes the words you type in and speaks them out loud, at the same time displaying a cartoon face that seems to be speaking the words.

Fun things to do with tts