Re: Installation files of WebAnywhere
Jeffrey Bigham
WebAnywhere expects is to be able to load a parameterized URL and get
back an MP3.
In its current release, accessing
http://wa.cs.washington.edu/cgi-bin/getsound.pl?text=string returns an
MP3 that says "string." You can pass in anything as that argument and
it will return an MP3 that says that.
If you want to make it work with another TTS engine, you need to build
the server-side web components to make this work.
There are examples of this for Festival and eSpeak written in Perl in
the SVN. The Festival one gets a .wav file back from Festival, and
then uses a different program to convert sound to MP3. You should be
able to do something similar for your sound format.
Let me know if you have any more questions.
Thanks,
-Jeff
On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Shilpi Kapoor <shi...@barrierbreak.com> wrote:
> Dear Jeffrey,
>
> I hope your doing well. I have a few questions:
>
> I am trying to configure WebAnywhere with Nuance Speech technology. Nuance
> has its own speech server, but the files are .pcm files. I think webanywhere
> is using MP3? Is that right?
>
> I am trying to see if we can integrate the two. Nuance has told us that we
> need to write an API to get webanywhere to talk to nuance.
>
> I was wondering if you can point us in the direction of which file should we
> be modifying to change the TTS Server. I think it is the getsound.pl. Is
> that right?
>
> Also any help on what you think we should be doing would be great.
>
> Also Nuance API would be in C++ and Visual C++. Would that be ok for
> webanywhere?
>
> Sorry for asking all the dumb questions.
>
>
> Thanks & Regards
> Shilpi Kapoor | Managing Director
> BarrierBreak Technologies
> India: +91 (22) 2686 0485/86
> Cell: +91-98199 85266
> USA: +1 (781) 452 0677
> Web: http://www.barrierbreak.com
> BarrierBreak | Techshare India 2008 |Accessibility Blog
> BarrierBreak Technologies a subsidiary of Net Systems Informatics
>
> Please don't print this email unless you really need to. This will preserve
> trees on our planet.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeffrey Bigham [mailto:jbi...@cs.washington.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 11:42 PM
> To: Shilpi Kapoor
> Subject: Re: Installation files of WebAnywhere
>
> Hi Shilpi,
>
> WebAnywhere is designed to work well with other speech servers. It's
> protocol is basically just:
>
> Server is web accessible and WebAnywhere can retrieve the MP3
> representation of a string including that string in the URL. For
> example,
> http://mydomain.com/speech-server.php?text=hello world
>
> Any server that works with WebAnywhere is then expected to return an
> MP3 that says "hello world"
>
> Please check in config.php for the URL that is currently used.
>
> That said, I don't actually know any other speech servers that work this
> way.
>
>
> I have recently developed a server that runs on the Windows platform
> and makes use of SAPI voices. Is Nuance a SAPI-compliant voice?
>
> Also, you can get many 3rd-party speech engines to work with Festival.
> I'm not sure if Nuance is included. You should consider trying this
> route - I know there are many voices available for Festival. And many
> many more that work with SAPI.
>
> I'm going to be traveling for the next week or so. I'll still respond
> to email, but might be a little slower than usual.
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 4:11 AM, Shilpi Kapoor <shi...@barrierbreak.com>
> wrote:
>> Hi Jeffrey,
>>
>> I have a question, can we setup webanywhere on any Speech Server. We want
> to
>> develop it with Indian Voices and Indian English Accent, and wanted to try
>> to use nuance speech. Any suggestions on how we can do this.
>>
>> Also has anyone tried it on any other Speech Server other than Festival?
>>
>> Would be great to get your inputs on the same.
>>
>> Thanks & Regards
>> Shilpi Kapoor | Managing Director
>> BarrierBreak Technologies
>> India: +91 (22) 2686 0485/86
>> Cell: +91-98199 85266
>> USA: +1 (781) 452 0677
>> Web: http://www.barrierbreak.com
>> BarrierBreak | Techshare India 2008 |Accessibility Blog
>> BarrierBreak Technologies a subsidiary of Net Systems Informatics
>>
>> Please don't print this email unless you really need to. This will
> preserve
>> trees on our planet.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jeffrey Bigham [mailto:jbi...@cs.washington.edu]
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 5:11 AM
>> To: Shilpi Kapoor
>> Subject: Re: Installation files of WebAnywhere
>>
>> Hi Shilpi,
>>
>> Congratulations on getting it working!
>>
>> The main thing you'll need to do to get WebAnywhere working with new
>> voices is to find the voices (speech synthesizers) themselves.
>> Currently, WebAnywhere works with the Festival TTS engine, which
>> supports a number of voices, although I'm not sure about Indian
>> languages.
>>
>> I think the first step is to find what TTS options are available for
>> the languages you want to support. Then we can figure out which is
>> most appropriate for use within WebAnywhere.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Jeff
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Shilpi Kapoor <shi...@barrierbreak.com>
>> wrote:
>>> Hi Jeffrey,
>>>
>>> Just wanted to let you know that we managed to solve the problems.
>>> http://speechenable.barrierbreak.com/wa/
>>>
>>> I am really interested in working on Indian accent and Indian language
>>> support. Do let me know how we can explore this with you'll. Since this
> is
>> a
>>> really great product.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>> Shilpi
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Shilpi Kapoor [mailto:shi...@barrierbreak.com]
>>> Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 5:15 PM
>>> To: 'Jeffrey Bigham'
>>> Subject: RE: Installation files of WebAnywhere
>>>
>>> Hi Jeffrey,
>>> Thanks, we downloaded the same and installed it. We now have a few
>> problems.
>>>
>>>
>>> 1. We are getting some junk characters in the address box
>>> 2. Other than the first page now of the others are reading. We have a
>>> permission denied issue.
>>>
>>> http://speechenable.barrierbreak.com/wa/
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance for your help.
>>>
>>> Regards
>>> Shilpi
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Jeffrey Bigham [mailto:jbi...@cs.washington.edu]
>>> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 8:34 PM
>>> To: Shilpi Kapoor
>>> Subject: Re: Installation files of WebAnywhere
>>>
>>> Hi Shilpi,
>>>
>>> You can get it on the googlecode site, but you'll need to check it out
>>> with SVN. I'm hoping to get an official "release" up there, but for
>>> now this is still available.
>>>
>>> The direct link is here:
>>> http://code.google.com/p/webanywhere/source/checkout
>>>
>>> On linux, the svn command is likely already available to you. If
>>> you're on Windows, you'll need a program like TortoiseSVN.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Jeff
>>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 3:10 AM, Shilpi Kapoor <shi...@barrierbreak.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> We would like to experiment with using WebAnywhere and suggesting it as
>> an
>>>> option. I tried going to the googlecode.com but there was no download
>>>> available of the source code available.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Can I get information on how to access the source code.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Regards
>>>>
>>>> Shilpi
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jeffrey P. Bigham, Graduate Student
>>> Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
>>> http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jbigham/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jeffrey P. Bigham, Graduate Student
>> Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
>> http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jbigham/
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Jeffrey P. Bigham, Graduate Student
> Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
> http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jbigham/
>
>
--
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Graduate Student
Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jbigham/
