Tag Archives: TTS

ATbar access to Google docs, Facebook and Twitter improved plus other updates

atbar google docsThere have been recent updates to make the tool-bar more robust and compatible with browsers and the results have meant increased access to Google docs, Facebook (except Chrome at present) and Twitter – the text to speech and word prediction work when you change the background look and feel using the painter’s palate  (change page style).   The colour overlay can be toggled on an off for all websites and works with click through so you can go to another site even if you have the coloured overlay in place.

Work on the style sheet issues has also meant that the dialog boxes in ATbar do not always take on the style sheet of the target website.  This also saves time when implementing new plugins and adding new things to the tool-bar as there are less style clashes so it is easier to customise the tool-bar for particular websites.

TTS logos

The latest version of the Festival Speech Synthesis System is now available as an option on the ATbar Market place website. The Festival plugin works in a similar way to the commercial Acapela TTS plugin.

ATbar now works with all the free speech synthesisers such as eSpeak and Mbrola but the quality of some of the voices is still a challenge for most listeners.

 

New ATbar YouTube video in Arabic and continued maintenance

Nawar Halabi has very kindly provided an introductory video of the Arabic version of ATbar and we have uploaded it to YouTube.

YouTube video overview of ATbar in Arabic
Nawar has also been testing the Arabic version as part of our maintenance programme.  We have found some issues with Arabic mis-aligned text at times and there are occasions when the CSS of the website needs to be isolated from the toolbar.  Otherwise all the plugins appear to have worked well in the last few months.

testing dictionary

Testing the Arabic dictionary

testing word prediction

Testing the spell checker, text to speech and word prediction.

arabic report

Where failures were reported these were double checked and found to be due to the word not being a partial word or not being in the dictionaries – usually due to an English speaking person trying to cut and past Arabic words!

 

Testing times with Arabic Windows 8 and Arabic eSpeak.

A visit to the Assistive Technology Industry Association 2013 conference where the Microsoft team kindly showed me how we could work in Arabic and English plus the arrival of our Dell tablet with Windows 8 has made us look at the issue of Qatari Arabic support and Windows in depth.

qatari keyboard Qatari Arabic language pack

We downloaded the language pack and changed the keyboard and all seemed well but it appears from the email I received from their product advisor that there is no Window Arabic voice at present.

“I researched the question to see if Windows 8 supports Arabic (namely Qatari dialect) text to speech. Unfortunately, at this time, Windows 8 does not support it. Only certain languages are included in the built in software.”

So back to the drawing board for the ATbar desktop option – Narrator is not going to speak in Arabic unless someone has found an Arabic Windows system with a well hidden free voice from Microsoft!   If anyone has found a solution to this problem please do let us know!

eSpeak

eSpeak logo

More research and thanks to a recent development with Arabic eSpeak we now have a free voice,  Testing has shown that the voice needs to be improved but with work on the phonetics in the future this is something that could be done.  The aim is to ship NVDA with the ATbar desktop version and the Arabic eSpeak voice.  It will not really be an acceptable voice where a Nuance or Acapela option is available.

 

translation into ArabicThe Windows 8 mobile OS has the potential to support more Arabic options and offers translation from OCR although the actual text is still not 100% correct – Spot the problem!

Nuance has a choice of Arabic voices  for mobile and has added speech recognition but none of our team have been able to test its success rates.  Google has also rolled out speech recognition in Arabic for Android phones 

We have been testing online speech recognition systems offered by Google Chrome and they really are not very successful in the Arabic dialects offered.  Below is an example of Speech Recognizer in Arabic.

speech recognizer

The TalkTyper system uses Speech Recognizer for speech recognition as well as text to speech – the latter uses a very good voice in Arabic – we are still exploring which voice is used but it sounds like Nuance Maged in Arabic.

What this spot for updates next week linked to the ATbar desktop app and ATbar TTS.

 

 

 

ATbar has a choice of voices and a colour overlay plugin.

Arabic voice choices

Arabic voice choices

We have been experimenting with voices on the ATbar as there has been some discussion about using a male voice as this may be more acceptable to some users.  We really would value your input into these thoughts.  The English version of the toolbar now has Lucy (F) and Peter (M) and the Arabic voices are now Leila (F) and Mehdi (M).  This additional service comes thanks to Insipio and the work Lars and Magnus carried out over the last few weeks.

The return of the text to speech from the server has been reduced from 4 to 2 seconds – we will monitor whether this has an other unforeseen consequences.

Magnus has also add another plugin as standard to the Arabic and English toolbars.  A colour overlay plugin that will allow users to read websites with less glare. There is a choice of colours – cream, pink, pale blue and pale green.  We hope this will help those who have visual stress, find the glare of black on white hard to read as well as those with other specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia.  If you are using Chrome, Safari and FireFox browsers you will also be able to click through the overlay and even write with most forms.  Sadly Opera and Internet Explorer do not support a click through ability. There is a step by step guide on the ATbar wiki in English and Arabic.

pink overlaywordpress with blue overlay

 Looking to the coming months

Arabic Dictionary

Nawar has been working on a new dictionary that will offer users a word list that is more useful for Arabic speakers – it will be based on prefixes and suffixes with root words that may then link with Arabic Wiktionary if it exists and he is hoping to adapt the way the results are presented. It is hoped this will be finished by the end of March 2013

dictionary plan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CSS issues

Magnus is working on the CSS issues that occur with some Arabic websites – we have recently been running evaluations on a series of important sites to see how prevalent the problem actually is with the poor presentation of our dialog boxes.  I will be blogging about the particular issues and we will be illustrating the results of the changes as they happen.   It is possible to change the dialog box for individual sites as has been done in the past but this is not the answer as sites constantly change so we need to find a robust solution that works for all.  This will be finished by the end of January.

TTS free voices

TTS work has been on-going and Nawar has tried the Euler/Mbrola route which despite much experimentation has not been successful so far.  eSpeak experiments are ongoing for the desktop version and it is hoped that we can still find a solution for both desktop and  web based toolbar TTS functions by the end of March 2013.

Meetings with Mesar at ATSummit resulted in a discussion about NVDA being used for text to speech as well as a screen reader – in other words developing a way for the program to respond to selected text that has been visually highlighted as well as offer more options to reduce the verbosity for dyslexic users.

Arabic ATbar Desktop version (Windows Xp, 7)

We want to have a free TTS  for the Windows system desktop ATbar when we link it to NVDA as at present the desktop version links to Narrator which does not read in all applications but offers good selected text to speech and screen reading feedback in Wordpad, Notepad, Internet Explorer and works with all individual letters typed as well as for all actions on the Windows desktop and with system operations -the help file has useful keyboard shortcuts.

The ATbar desktop version once installed launches at start up and has menu buttons for text to speech, coloured overlays, an onscreen keyboard and magnification as mentioned in our previous news update.

desktopATbar

 

 

 

 

There is an ATbar desktop download available    There is now a portable version of the desktop ATbar that can be used on USB pendrives – the lower menu button on ATbar website.  The work on the desktop version has been completed and is awaiting any comments from users.

YouTube videos illustrating the ATbar features.

We have set up a series of YouTube videos that include:

Text resizing, font style changes and line spacing. This video has no audio but shows how a user can select the magnifier on the toolbar to enlarge text without resizing the graphics – this tends to allow for more readable text when compared to zooming using the browser Ctrl+ which also enlarges the graphics.  However, this feature does not work when Flash has been used within a webpage or fonts have fixed sizes or styles.  The same applies to increased line spacing which is also demonstrated.

YouTube link to the video

The second video demonstrates how the A.I.Type word prediction works as well as spell checking when writing a blog using WordPress.  Use the HTML mode when working in the edit box rather than the Visual mode and then you will also be able to use the text to speech to aid proof reading.


YouTube link to the video

The last video demonstrates the use of text to speech with the Acapela voice in both Arabic and English.


YouTube link to the video

ATBar Word Prediction and Text to Speech working in text boxes

Arabic wordprediction

Arabic wordprediction with keyboard access

Seb has enabled the AIType word prediciton with keyboard access and text to speech for simple text boxes in his recent updates to the toolbar for both Arabic and English.

The Word prediction button needs to be selected before entering text.  It is possible to use the ‘esc’key to ignore a prediction and close the dialog box or use Ctrl+Alt and the word position as a number to insert the required word.

word prediction

Word Prediction in WordPress

We have found that the prediction and text to speech work with HTML views of text boxes in WordPress and Blogger but not the Visual mode which overrides the ATbar.

The text needs to be highlighted before the text to speech button is selected.  There may be a pause before you hear the speech.

Insight into the issues for open source TTS in Arabic.

Over the summer the team have been investigating the issues around TTS in Arabic and Edrees Abdu Alkinani has completed his MSc report which has made interesting reading as it summarises many of the findings.   It was noted that Arabic TTS synthesis did not have the early successes of European languages due to the limitations in Natural Language Processing (NLP)  and the complexities of using diacritics as substitutes for vowel combinations. However, with the advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) plus automatic diacrtizers progress is being developed progress has been made in the commercial world where there are now several attractive Arabic synthesised voices as will be seen in an evaluation to follow.

Issue No 1 – Lack of diacritics on web pages.

Arabic diacritics

The Learning Resource - Arabic language

English speakers may wonder at the reasons for the difficulties with Arabic TTS, but it does not take more than a cursory glance at the written language to understand that having 14 different diacritic marks with 34 phonemes, 28 of which are consonants, and only six vowels that the combinations may cause TTS problems. As Eedris pointed out… ” كُتُبْ ” means books and ” كَتَبَ ” means wrote – the only difference you will notice is the type of marks used above the letters.

English vowel sounds

TEFL world wiki - English vowel sounds

This is compared to the English basic 12 vowel sounds with no accents or diacritics even though we may complain about our odd pronunciation of some written words – rough, cough, though, thorough and through – at least some of the letters are different and we cannot leave any out.   Yet this is what is happening with written Arabic on the web – the diacritics are being left out….. Number one problem for a text to speech engine.

Issue No 2 – The differences between the way the TTS is developed and the resulting output.

Research has shown that although there are now a few text to speech engines they are commercial and even these vary in quality.  The MBROLA project links to work carried out in the open source world, but at present it has been impossible to achieve success with the code offered in the various repositories for evaluation purposes.    However, Eedris has supplied the team with these comments based on the demonstrators offered by the various organisations and companies.

  1. MBROLA project
    MBROLA has two Arabic voices as a recorded audio file. The speed of speech is slow, and the quality poor. Moreover, the pronunciation is hard to understand – even for a an Arabic speaker.  The stress pattern is often incorrect and the distinction between words unclear. The most difficult words to understand have letters like, “ أ” ‘A’, “ ض” ‘th’, “ ل” ‘L’.
  2. Acapela Group
    Acapela offers two good quality male and female voices.  The pronunciation for words with and without diacritic marks is understandable, with accurate stress patterns. There are three letters which appear to cause some difficulty  “ ج” ‘j’, “ ا’ ‘a’, “ ك” ‘k’. The pronunciation of numbers in all situations is good.
  3. Nuance Vocalizer
    Nuance provide a very clear male voice with clear pronunciation. The only problem is that the system produces speech without taking into account diacritics. Words which have letters like “ ق” ‘q’, “ ش” ‘sh’, and “ ض” ‘th’ may cause problems but the speed of speech used in the online demo is good. Numbers are not clearly enunciated due to the lack of diacritics.
  4. Loquendo
    Loquendo offer a recording of a male and female voice on their site as the Arabic voice has only be available since October 2010. The system has good sound quality clear speech. The example on the website has diacritic marks but as it is a small sample it is hard to judge the overall quality but it appears to be good.


Issue No 3 – Further Development of eSpeak with Arabic.

The current version of MBROLA does not appear to run with the arabic voice files and there seem to be very few people who have had success.  So this is work in progress…