[vlc-devel] Need help developing text-to-speech-module in VLC - offering £5.000

[Adrian Glaubitz]

On Apr 7, 2011, at 12:15 PM, Sandra Derbring wrote:

> > user state this). In terms of free vs licensing, will this be a problem? On
> > top of my head, I can think of espeak (not very good) and Festival,
> > supporting Swedish phonetics, but I am sure there are more.
> 
> If you speak about this Festival: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
> the license, is a X11 type license and is compatible with the LGPL and
> GPLv2+ of VLC.
> 
> That's good to know. How would it work if the user already had a licensed engine on their system? 

What about MARY? [1] It supports a variety of languages and the developers
also claim to be adding support to other languages in near future.

I think it would be the best idea to primarily target at using an open source
text2speech engine. This will increase the chances the code will be always
maintained and you will also make sure that really everyone with sight
impairing can use the software, not everyone can afford the license fees
for the commercial text2speech software. Also, when you develop the
VLC plugin to support one, free text2speech engine only, you will
reduce the amount of required work to be done for the plugin.

When using a free text2speech engine, I think the first good step would be
to add support for the Swedish language. Then concentrate on the VLC
plugin.


Greetings from Norway,

Adrian

[1] http://mary.dfki.de/