[KDE-India] new idea, screen reader for KDE desktop

[Vivek Rai]

> now since we know that openoffice and things like that can work on
> regional languages (can some one give me more info on that).
yes, i think we have some GUI translations for hindi, tamil, bangla
and punjabi..

> look forward for that email.
> mean while, I will like to know as to how much development has taken
> place in festival voice synthesizer in regional languages.

i knew of a guy (who studied with me in college) and created an ms
windows based tool.  it  used MS speech SDK to read devanagri text.
last i knew, he had setup a company, and was selling this
commercially. (his company is also into other services, btw)

I am not aware of any equivalent in FLOSS world.. however, we do have
speech synthesis tools and libraries like festival,
(http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/)

So, the quickest way to get this working would be to define lexicons
for some desi languages to one of such existing TTS tools. Since
Indian languages have an umambiguous pronunciation of a written
expression, this could actually be simpler than it is for a language
like english or french.

If you are keen to work on this, I would suggest you speak to the
relevant people at University of Edinburgh, get some funda on adding
new language to festival.

who knows, (if they have the budget etc) you MAY even get some funding
for this work.