See you at foss.in!

• Support for 11 languages- Hindi, Panjabi, Gujarati, Marati, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil , Malayalam and Pashto(Afganistan)
• Pitch and Tempo modification for speech
• Direct ogg-vorbis speech output and optional wav output format
• C/C++ APIs for applications to use dhvani as a shared library.
• Generic driver for Speech-dispatcher and Integration to Orca through speech dispatcher
• Python binding through speech dispatcher
• Improved language detection algorithm

Dhvani documentation is available here.

Binary packages and source code are available here

Thanks

• Rahul Bhalerao for Marathi module and patches
• Zabeehkhan for Pashto Module
• Nirupama, CDAC Chennai and CDAC Noida people for testing and reporting bugs
• NRCFOSS Chennai, Krishnakanth Mane and many others for feedbacks
• Amida Simputer team for patches on Telugu module especially the Telugu number reading logic
• Debayan and Roshan for testing and informing problems

There was good amount of code change in this version. Still there are many improvements to do in language modules and synthesizer. Some of the language modules requires developers who speak that language. Syntheziser got some improvements and require some amount of research to make the speech more natural. So your feedbacks, suggestions, bug reports and patches are valuable.

PS: A note for quick usage after installation from binary: After installing deb or rpm, Open gedit, edit->preferences->plugins, enable external tools. Dhvani will be available as a plugin there. Select some text in any of the supporting languages and click the Dhvani menu.

/*
UTF8Decoder.c
This program converts a utf-8 encoded string to utf-16 hexadecimal code sequence

UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding of Unicode.
UTF-16 is a fixed width encoding of two bytes

A UTF-8 decoder must not accept UTF-8 sequences that are longer than necessary to
encode a character. For example, the character U+000A (line feed) must be accepted from
a UTF-8 stream only in the form 0x0A, but not in any of the following five possible overlong forms:

  0xC0 0x8A
  0xE0 0x80 0x8A
  0xF0 0x80 0x80 0x8A
  0xF8 0x80 0x80 0x80 0x8A
  0xFC 0x80 0x80 0x80 0x80 0x8A

Ref: UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

Author: Santhosh Thottingal <santhosh.thottingal at gmail.com>
License: This program is licensed under GPLv3 or later version(at your choice)
*/
#include<stdlib.h>
#include<stdio.h>
#include<string.h>
unsigned short
utf8_to_utf16 (unsigned char *text, int *ptr)
{

  unsigned short c;		/*utf-16 character */
  int i = 0;
  int trailing = 0;
  if (text[*ptr] < 0x80)	/*ascii character till 128 */
    {
      trailing = 0;
      c = text[(*ptr)++];
    }
  else if (text[*ptr] >> 7)
    {
      if (text[*ptr] < 0xE0)
	{
	  c = text[*ptr] & 0x1F;
	  trailing = 1;
	}
      else if (text[*ptr] < 0xF8)
	{
	  c = text[*ptr] & 0x07;
	  trailing = 3;
	}

      for (; trailing; trailing--)
	{
	  if ((((text[++*ptr]) & 0xC0) != 0x80))
	    break;
	  c <<= 6;
	  c |= text[*ptr] & 0x3F;
	}

    }
  return c;

}

/* for testing */
int
main ()
{
  char *instr = "സന്തോഷ് തോട്ടിങ്ങല്‍";	/* my name   */
  int length = strlen (instr);
  int i = 0;

  for (; i < length;)
    {
      printf ("0x%.4x ", utf8_to_utf16 (instr, &i));
    }
  printf ("\n");
/* output is:
0x0d38 0x0d28 0x0d4d 0x0d24 0x0d4b 0x0d37 0x0d4d 0x0020 0x0d24 0x0d4b 0x0d1f 0x0d4d 0x0d1f 0x0d3f 0x0d19 0x0d4d 0x0d19 0x0d32 0x0d4d 0x200d
*/

  return 0;
}

There may be already existing libraries for this, but writing a simple one ourself is fun and good learning experience.

For example, in python, to get the UTF-16 code sequence for a unicode string, we can use this:


str=u"സന്തോഷ്‌"

print repr(str)


This gives the following output


u'\u0d38\u0d28\u0d4d\u0d24\u0d4b\u0d37\u0d4d'


Rahul also gave some patches for hindi module and for some other bugs. The code is available in CVS.

The automatic language detection algorithm will not work for Marathi since it uses the devanagari script and I have assigned the unicode range used for language detection to Hindi. So it requires a langauge switch like “dhvani -l mr inputfile”

Many new features for dhvani are in development, incluiding pitch and tempo control of the generated speech. And I am trying to improve the code quality too.

I had demonstrated the tamil module at NRCFOSS, AU-KBC centre, chennai a few days back and Amachu offered help for improving the tamil pronunciaton rules.

For those are interested in Marathi module, I have some sample speech files generated by dhvani in ogg format. The text is taken from an article about Marathi langauge in Marathi wikipedia. Here is the article and here is the exact text used for the speech
1. With default pitch and tempo- Male voice
2. Female voice by positive pitch shift- A feature in development

Dhvani has an IRC channel now: #dhvani at freenode

Done. Now you can type some text in the Kmouth and ask it speak.

To avoid typing the words that are used often, create a Phrasebook. Refer KMouth Help document for that. You can also add a wordlist so that you will get autocompletion feature while typing words. Refer Kmouth Handbook for that also. It is easy and just a matter of giving some text file to learn.
I hope it will be helpfull for the dumb users even though there are some practical problem like keeping the computer with them…

For for information about dhvani, how to install etc see the documentation

Select the syntesizer type as Command and Langauge as Other. You can select any language since Dhvani doesn’t want langauge parameter and it detects the language automatically.
Give the synthesizer command as dhvani %f

Move this synthesizer to top in the list of Synthesizers and Click apply. Done.
Now take a UTF-8 text in any of the editors described above or take a webpage in any of the supported language. From the tools menu take Speak Text and listen !!!
For for information about dhvani, how to install etc see the documentation

Now your mp3 file is ready. Transfer it to your music player and enjoy!

I have a sample Malayalam Audio book here

Note: The speech produced for Languages other than Hindi and Malayalam may not be as per their pronunciation rules. There are two solution for this:
a) Teach me that langauge or
b) Submit a patch to fix that language module

You can find the Dhvani documentation here