Alternative Browsers / Test Software

Hi All

For what it's worth, I have thrown together a very, very basic voice 
user agent (UA).  I did this for three reasons:
1) To have a "stupid" UA which speaks what it's given - lets me hear 
whether my work makes sense when spoken.
2) To provide a speech interface for a kiosk system that I am working on.
3) To allow me to understand the issues involved when designing a 
mechanical system that can interpret XHTML content.

The UA is written in Perl, with a Tk User Interface. It operates by 
retrieving a page, converting the XHTML (I only designed it to test my 
own stuff) to the Sable markup language, using XSLT and then passing the 
result to the Festival Text-to-Speech (TTS) system.

This programme is *not* designed for "surfing the Web"; links are 
announced, but there is no user interaction once reading has started.

For clarity, I use the Mbrola en1 male voice for page titles, headings, 
etc., and the Mbrola us1 female voice for content.  Festival's default 
voice kicks in for all the tag conversions that I haven't included in 
the stylesheet.

The functionality can be changed/expanded easily, simply by 
changing/adding rules to the stylesheet.

If anyone would find this useful, please contact me off-list.  The 
software is written for a Linux/Unix environment, but could probably be 
converted to other Operating Systems by those with the savvy.

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
IT Consultant
Kadina, South Australia

Received on Saturday, 21 December 2002 17:41:06 UTC