Speaking devices on MSP430 for visually impaired

[t0mpr1c3]

I was really taken with SimpleAVR's port of the webbot speech synthesizer to the MSP4302553:
http://www.43oh.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... 547&p16369

The sound quality is fairly ropey but the there must be plenty of applications for embedding a talking microcontroller, especially for the recently visually impaired.

Yes a speaking word clock, weather station, newsreel, all that sort of stuff that hackers are already doing, but are there also new applications that can be specifically targeted at the visually impaired? I am thinking in particular of old people who may have recently lost their sight due to age related macular degeneration etc.

[t0mpr1c3]

How about a talking calculator? Could be easily prototyped with something like Teensy + USB keypad.

[matseng]

I must say that it sounded like crap - at least compared to this http://syntensity.com/static/espeak.html javascript (converted from C++ code) speech synthesizer that runs in the browser.

I wonder how much "oomph" you really need to do this kind of processing - would a 32 bit PIC/AVR be enough? I think I have to try some day.

[t0mpr1c3]

Point taken. I think it actually sounds worse than the SP0256. I would think it is mostly a question of storing sufficiently high resolution speech samples. The webbot lib fits in 6K so there is plenty of room for improvement. Thanks for sharing the link to the other speech synth software, perhaps I should look around a bit more to see if there is something better that can easily be ported.

[matseng]

It seems like eSpeak doesn't have any speech samples. The project page at SourceForge says:

eSpeak uses a "formant synthesis" method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

But looking at the javascript source there's still a plenty of tables with a lot of data.... http://syntensity.com/static/speakGenerator.js

[t0mpr1c3]

Worth a look. It sounds fine to me.

There's also Flite which is written in C and has been used on linux ARM7 architectures: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/

Maybe its all moot since you can get electronic calculators on ebay for $9.

[t0mpr1c3]

iTead have very kindly offered to send me a 4x4 keypad Arduino shield to help develop this project. Thanks Wendy and everyone at @iteadstudio! :-D

[t0mpr1c3]

I got the webbotlib speech library going on an Arduino just now. The speech is quality is indeed terrible, but I'll go with it for now. Once I have a prototype up I can try something else. Possibly real speech samples rather than phonemes.

A brief survey of youtube tells me that all talking calculators simply blurt out the digits. It might be nice to hear proper number strings like "four thousand two hundred forty one" rather than 4-2-4-1. Any opinions on that?

I have also found various implementations of the shunting yard algorithm for doing the calculations. Only fancy graphical calculators actually use this algorithm, but I'll go with it for now. It will be easy enough to dumb it down later to mimic cheap calculators.

[matseng]

There's also Flite which is written in C and has been used on linux ARM7 architectures: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/

Yea, the speech from the Flite engine is definitely sounding good as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXnHje8tv6g

[t0mpr1c3]

Yes. Flite on Raspi certainly would be a possibility. I'm looking into whether Flite could run on a Stellaris Launchpad.

Once I've got the Arduino prototype up and running I'll put up a video in a new project thread. I've got a full featured scientific calculator going over UART, just need to integrate it with the speech and format the output properly (sprintf useless in Arduino IDE.)

[t0mpr1c3]

Just had a quick look at what scientific calculators are available for the partially sighted, and they are in the $250+ range compared to $!0-$20 for cheapies. That's quite a price gap. I had no idea. I don't like the idea of partially sighted high school students sharing calculators.

http://www.tsbvi.edu/technology-math/23 ... t-research

[t0mpr1c3]

Well, I now have an Arduino croaking out arithmetic like an asthmatic dalek. Now I'm looking at moving it over to 64 bit floating point arithmetic. Fortunately some Germans have done the heavy lifting.

I'll continue developing the project on a new thread.

[t0mpr1c3]

Talking thermometer?
Shouting alarm clock?