Has anybody developed a Text to Speach application which works inside Moodle?
The Application would only work when the Tutor or Student clicks the speech button.
Speech to text has been available for some time, and is fairly good right now once you have trained it. I have made posts in the past using IBM's Via Voice just to try it out. Text to speech is a bit more difficult and is outside the design purpose of Moodle. This function is fairly cpu intensive and not very evolved right now on the desktop side. Don't look for it in Moodle any time soon.
Dear Mark Little, Hi Bryan
There are some online text to speech technologies but none in php and none are yet integrated with moodle.
This is virtual version of me with text to speech, more hair, younger, thinner, more handsome etc. I am not sure what text to speech engine the company that provides it (Oddcast / vhost / sitepal) are using but it is clear that one can hook it up to the artificial intelligence robots at Pandorabots.
Judging by the voice, my guess is that they got together with the people at AT&T, demoed here. RealSpeak is similar project with perhaps even better speech quality.
I have seen some text to speech projects around the net.
Using Javahttp://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php
Aha, this is a great review of text to speech programmes.
http://sig.levillage.org/index.php?p=551
Alas, as the writer says, there is no pure free php option, other than Festival which is installed on the serve and then called from php.
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
From my university. I remember very sincere students working on this. One of them studied Japanese with me.
I bet it will not be long before there is a SOAP web service providing TTS.
Timothy
Timothy,
Thanks for sharing this. Your virtual self is a hoot! I just had a conversation with him and for the most part it was fairly intelligent. He really needs to get out more though, didn't know where Washington D.C. was.
Bryan
Glad you liked "Teamothi" (the TTS can't pronounce my name so I had to write "teamothi")
Sorry about his lack of geographical sense. He has been behind a computer monitor a lot lately. I will try and train him a bit more - I can be done via the pandora bots interface. He will praise Washington to the high heavens.
Timothy
I notice that this thread has been very quiet for a long time, but I am hoping that someone out there can answer...
Have you ever heard of an online instructor who was able to teach in Moodle using only speech-to-text as the input method? Any other thoughts how someone with severe carpal tunnel symptoms could manage with an online class?
Gina
Have you ever heard of an online instructor who was able to teach in Moodle using only speech-to-text as the input method? Any other thoughts how someone with severe carpal tunnel symptoms could manage with an online class?
Gina
ViaVoice or Dragon Naturally Speaking would be good resources for inputting blocks of text, but I don't know how they would work for on-the-fly type input- like chats, etc. But, any situation where you can input in a word processor (for example) and then copy/paste the text to a Moodle resource would be appropriate. I don't know if they can be set up to input drectly into Moodle, haven't considered that in the past. The main thing is training them with your voice to get the acccuracy rate up to make it efficient.
I am thinking that Firefox and the FoxVox addon might be the way to go. I am personally working on accommodations for dyslexic students. Text to Speech is really important for them.