[mary-users] openMary driver for nvda or sapi 5 and mac

[Bill Cox]

Hi, Marc Schroeder.  I would be happy to assist integration of
OpenMary into Linux, by developing a speech-dispatcher driver for it
that interfaces to OpenMary.  Your assistance is very much
appreciated!  I'm a Linux geek at the moment, so I can't help with Mac
and Windows.

I'm happy to interface to OpenMary in the way you think is best.  As I
know nothing of the code, your point of view will almost certainly be
best.  The existing http interface seems fine to me.  Is that what you
mean by using the "native" interface?

I can also assist in building a Debian package for OpenMary, and while
I can't upload it to Ubuntu or Debian, I can at least lobby for it to
be included.  In the meantime, we can test it in the Vinux
distribution.  Blind Vinux users will surely welcome the OpenMary
voices.

The only potential issue I see with OpenMary might be the performance,
but frankly I know nothing of it's performance, so it's hopefully no
problem.  Blind listeners often speed up the TTS engine, which we can
do as a post-process to OpenMary.  So, for example, we may have blind
listeners generating 60 seconds worth of speech, but then listening to
it in only 10 seconds, putting stronger performance requirements on
the TTS engine.

Do you recommend that I proceed using the http interface?  If so, I
can begin making progress now.

Thanks,
Bill

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 2:40 AM, Marc Schroeder <marc.schroeder at dfki.de> wrote:
> Hello Bill, Hello Brandon,
>
> I am very happy to see your emails -- I have always hoped that one day
> OpenMary could become useful for people who cannot read with their eyes,
> and need a machine to read to them. My name is Marc Schröder and I am
> the person who has been driving the MARY TTS system forward for more
> than ten years now.
>
> While I will not have the time to implement by myself the pieces of code
> needed to hook up MARY into Linux, Mac and Windows, I will be very happy
> to give every assistence I can to volunteers like you who want to drive
> this forward.
>
> In fact, I had been thinking about what would have to happen. As I see
> it, the situation is as follows.
>
> 1. MARY TTS is a java application. It can run as a server implementing a
> HTTP protocol; it can also be called from java directly.
>
> 2. The native Speech API interfaces in Mac and Windows (and I guess in
> Linux as well) are in C++ (C#, ObjectiveC, etc.).
>
> 3. So somehow it is necessary to establish a link from the native
> interface to the java server. That can be done, in the simplest way, by
> hooking a MARY client in the native code to the native speech interface.
> The native client would basically act as a proxy passing requests and
> responses between the native API and the java server. Maybe other
> options are of value too, such as JNI ... I am open to suggestions.
>
>
> To summarise, if you are willing to drive this, I will be very happy to
> give you any support that is needed to get the bindings to OpenMary right.
>
> Best regards,
> Marc
>
> On 22.12.10 04:59, Bill Cox wrote:
>> Hi, Brandon.  I saw your reply over on the NVDA mailing list, and then
>> here.  Obviously, we must thing somewhat alike!  I don't actually use
>> NVDA, since I live in Linux land, but I do think NVDA is probably the
>> most important open-souce project for the blind.  So, I'm Bill Cox,
>> and it's nice to meet you.  I suspect we could collaborate just a bit
>> on incorporating openMary into open source platforms - me for Linux,
>> and you for NVDA.  Now if we could just get an openMary guru to help
>> us...
>>
>> Bill
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 10:54 PM, Brandon Misch<bmisch2002 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Hey my name is Brandon. I'm a blind windows user. is there someone i can talk to to see about soeone writing a driver for nvda (nonvisual desktop access) wich is a screen reader for blind people also, is there someone i can talk to in regards to seeing is openmary will work with apple's speech manager on the mac? Can we also see about openMary can be used with sapi 5 so other products can use it? just some thoughts. thanks.
>>>
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> --
> Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
> Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE http://www.semaine-project.eu
> Project leader for DFKI in SSPNet http://sspnet.eu
> Project leader PAVOQUE http://mary.dfki.de/pavoque
> Associate Editor IEEE Trans. Affective Computing http://computer.org/tac
> Editor W3C EmotionML Working Draft http://www.w3.org/TR/emotionml/
> Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net
> Team Leader DFKI TTS Group http://mary.dfki.de
>
> Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
> Email: marc.schroeder at dfki.de
> Phone: +49-681-85775-5303
> Postal address: DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123
> Saarbrücken, Germany
> --
> Official DFKI coordinates:
> Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
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