yasr and screen

[pj at pjb.com.au]

Hi :-)

I wrote:
> A big problem for installs is the BIOS;
> that, I guess, needs a separate computer with camera and O C R ...
> Perhaps the ideal solution would be to build speech into a
> touchscreen monitor, and not into the operating system ?

Trevor Saunders wrote:
> or you can just unplug the hard drive and whatever so the first
> bootable thing the bios finds will be your usb drive.  Then plug
> the drive back in to do the install of course, linux usually
> handles hard drives showing up after boot gracefully time.

Yes, nice trick :-)

A SpeakingVGA monitor would let you get work on the BIOS, though,
and on things like RAID cards where you have to press Ctrl-A
before boot to configure them or add and remove discs etc.

I had been thinking of a touchscreen, like a tablet computer,
that would speak any text you stroke a fingertip over.

More practical; if you could add a video-INPUT socket onto some old
computer, and also give one of its U S B ports a driver to make it
emulate a U S B keyboard; then you could use a video cable and a
U S B cable to plug the main computer into it, and have it work
as a virtual SVGA monitor with a speakup-like keyboard-interface.
It might even be possible to add a video-input socket to a
raspberry pi, and make the whole thing small and light.
Ambitious project, though, way beyond me...


I wrote:
> If I were rewriting yasr, I'd probably do it in perl or lua,
> which would reduce the code-bulk by several times,
> and make it more maintainable and portable.

Trevor wrote:
> I think some of it will need to stay in C / C++

Well, Perl and Lua can easily invoke routines written in C

> but allowing it to be scripted with lua sounds interesting.

After the fork and dup, in Perl you could use the existing
  http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Term::Terminfo
module to intercept all the right escape codes, and the
  http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Speech::eSpeak
module to speak with.  In Lua, best first step might be to translate
those Perl modules into Lua and get them onto the luarocks server...

Ideally (back in Perl), you would use Jouke Visser's
  http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Speech::Synthesis
module to provide a generic interface for different TTS Engines,
but it was last updated in 2005 and only supports:
  MSAgent, SAPI4 and SAPI5 (Win32), MacSpeech and Festival
  (connects to the default port on localhost)
so it doesn't yet know about espeak. It should be possible
to use the Speech::eSpeak module to give it espeak, though...

We have too many of these half-abandoned projects :-(

Peter

http://www.pjb.com.au      pj at pjb.com.au     (03) 6278 9410
"Follow the charge, not the particle."  --  Richard Feynman
 from The Theory of Positrons, Physical Review, 1949