[Marble-devel] Re: Voice Navigation

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi,

Great initiative! :-)

As I've said before: I'd really be keen on having a professional quality 
speaker as a reference. And I can't wait to hear custom records saying stuff 
like:

"The Marble team wishes you a pleasant and safe journey!"

I'll try to help finding some professional speaker for the german version (but 
no promises - so if somebody else has more success ...).

Best Regards,
Torsten

On Saturday, 5. February 2011 16:59:05 Dennis Nienhüser wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I looked into voice navigation (speaking out turn instructions, mainly
> for the mobile version) into more detail today. I made a
> proof-of-concept version (described below) and I'm looking for feedback
> before I give that the final touch.
> 
> Generally I feel that text-to-speech systems still sound too bad at this
> point to be usable for day-to-day operation. Instead I'd like to have
> pre-recorded voice samples. That approach works quite well given that
> the number of words to speak is rather limited. Ideally we'd ship at
> least one complete (english) voice from a professional speaker. If we
> don't find one, we could still fall back to replacing voice output with
> sounds (taking e.g. some existing KDE ones).
> 
> My plan is to re-use TomToms approach -- 59 short voice files -- and
> generate the sentences to speak from them. One sentence is either a full
> voice file or a concatenation of them when distances are involved (e.g.
> TurnRight.ogg + After.ogg + 200.ogg + Meters.ogg). Fortunately there are
> a bunch of these voice files out [1] [2] which can be downloaded for
> free by users (we cannot ship them though). That way we could ship one
> default voice sample set (done by us) and allow users to install others
> (e.g. localized ones or ones recorded by them) at their liking. The
> voice files need some conversion from the .chk format to be playable
> with phonon by Marble, but I could setup some website that handles that.
> 
> The remaining work is then:
> - Polish the code
> - Backport to Marble 1.1 (should keep ABI)
> - Find a professional speaker that does a Marble voice sample set for us
>   - If we don't find one, ask the community
>     - If we still don't find one, use KDE sounds as "voices". Doing that
> probably makes sense anyway for people not liking their N900 talk to
> them, but still want audible announcements.
> - Setup some website on my server (~php frontend to unpacking, oggz-rip
> and packing) to convert TomTom .chk files to the Marble format to allow
> users to install other voices
> 
> Feedback welcome.
> 
> Regards,
> Dennis
> 
> [1] http://www.voice-maniacs.com/
> [2] http://www.gps-data-team.com/pda-gps-navigation/links/index.php
> (scroll down)
> 
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