KDE Review - Moving Artikulate to KDE Edu

[Andreas Cord-Landwehr]

Hey all,

after about one year of development and two technical preview releases, we thought that is time to move 
Artikulate to KDE Review, with the goal to land eventually in the KDE Educational module. (a heads-up mail 
about this proposal also goes to the KDE-Edu list)

The repository for review is available here:
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kdereview/artikulate

The remaining of this mail is structured in:
1. What is Artikulate and why should it belong to KDE Edu
2. Compile, build and install instructions
3. The bigger picture about Artikulate (condider this part first for skipping, 
   if mail is too long :)

= What is Artikulate =
Artikulate is pronuncation training application that works by repeated listening to native speaker recordings, 
recording of the learner's own voice, and comparing both to see if the currently learned 
phrase/pronunciation is already mastered or not.

The application itself consists of two parts:
1. the learner part: aimed for the "common" learner
   explained in the Handbook (docbook format, see /doc folder)
2. the editor part: aimed for contributors who create courses
   currently we only aim to have technical course contributors and hence its
   documentation is available only at 
   http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Edu/Artikulate


= Compile, build, and install =
We have extended documentation about how to build and install Artikulate, to be found in the techbase 
wiki: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Edu/Artikulate/BuildAndInstall
At this point, I only want to give two remarks:
* when running, please make sure that the QML_IMPORT_PATH is correctly set (as explained at the wiki 
page), since otherwise the application closes with a fatal error
* we require the (yet) unreleased kqmlgraphplugin for plotting statistics graphs; this library/qml plugin is 
available in the KDE playground and its QML files also have to be included in the QML_IMPORT_PATH (details 
at the wiki page)


= The bigger picture =
Artikulate shall close the gap for pronunciation training applications in KDE Edu, since the focus of the 
currently available applications "only" lies on vocabulary training and memorizing (also mixed with 
edutainment applications).
The idea for this application isn't new, as there are a few commercial (but AFAIK barely known) Windows 
applications with similar learning concepts. Interestingly, those existing commercial applications are very 
hard to purchase.

As nearly every educational application, also for Artikulate it is crucial to have a set of high quality learning 
courses. For the beginning, we went the way to focus on /scenario courses/. This is, we collected phrases 
typical for scenarios one could face in real life (e.g. ordering food in a restaurant, asking for the way,...) By 
this we were able to create a blueprint for further courses that can simply be created by translating all 
phrases and recording them by native speakers. At the moment, essentially the courses for Bengali and 
Polish are done and there is active work on a course for Greek. The focus of our work for this year will 
hence be on recruting further contributors to finish scenario courses for more languages (and especially 
"core" languages like English, French, Spanish). Distribution of these courses is done over the 
downloads.kde.org infrastructure using knewstuff. (The next iteration of this will probably go the Bodega 
way.

Another focus -- once entered into KDE SC and hence once the application is available easier for non-
technical contributors -- a major goal is to start a cooperation with language teachers for 1-2 core 
languages.

The current state of the application is, that we think all essential features are done by now and we need to 
increase our user/tester base to get more feedback. That's essentially the point why we would like to get 
into the SC soon, to iron old the remaining rough edges and check early before hard-freeze that everything 
works on a wide range on platforms/distributions.

Greetings,
Andreas

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