SaySable

What it is

SaySable is a simple Perl programme which, given a URI, retrieves an XHTML document and converts it into Sable markup which can then be read using Festival.

SaySable is not an end-user programme, but is made available to developers and interested parties who may wish to play with it.

Why it was written

I wrote SaySable for the following reasons:

• I wanted to play with Text To Speech (TTS) but didn't want to pay for it :-)
• To provide a speech interface for a touch-screen kiosk project (Tivis), to make it accessible to those who cannot see or cannot read.
• As a means of testing how intelligible my pages sound when spoken (in other words, a validation tool).
• Because I needed a break from database programming!

How it works

SaySable uses the XSLT Perl module to translate one type of XML markup (XHTML) into another (Sable). The rules for the translation are contained in a stylesheet. To expand the limited functionality of the current SaySable release, you just need to add new rules to the stylesheet.

System requirements

SaySable has been developed on Linux, but should be usable on any platform which meets the following requirements:

• Perl 5.6.0 or higher (developed and tested on Perl 5.8.0)
• Festival TTS from http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
• MBROLA (optional, but gives extra voices) from http://tcts/fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html

License

SaySable, being Perl based, is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.

Contributions

Please mail any useful changes/additions to the stylesheet to the author, Matthew Smith at saysable@kbc.net.au These will be posted on this site, or wherever the project ends up, should I run out of bandwidth.

Files

• saysable.pl - the SaySable programme itself.
• html2sable.xslt - the SaySable stylesheet.
• sayweather.sh - a shell script that fetches a (South Australian) weather forecast and then speaks it.

Download SaySable Tarball (.tgz)

Matthew Smith - Kadina, South Australia
December 2002 - January 2003

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