Santhosh Thottingal സന്തോഷ് തോട്ടിങ്ങല്‍

Dhvani can help not only blind users but also dumb users. I will explain how dhvani act as your mouth using KMouth.
Kmouth is as KDE Accessibility Appllication and it act as a test to speech front end. KMouth is a program that enables persons that cannot speak to let their computers speak. It includes a history of spoken sentences from which the user can select sentences to be re-spoken. It learns the words the user wrote and have autocompletion. It also includes a phrasebook, using that you can store the commonly used phrases for quick access.
We will see how dhvani can be used with Kmouth.
open KMouth : KMenu->Utilities->Accessibility->Kmouth. Install it if not already installed
You will get configuration window and give the "Command to speak text" as dhvani %f




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

It is possible integrate Dhvani Indian Langauge TTS to KDE desktop through its TTS system KTTS. Using this you can dhvani can read the text in kate,kedit,kwrite, Konqueror. You can even listen to the text in the webpages in Konqueror
Dhvani can be itegrated to KTTS using its Command plugin feature. To do this go to control center-->Regional and Accessibility -->Text-to-speech -->Talker Tab. Add a new Synthesizer.


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

Dhvani can be used for creating audiobooks in any of the supported languages(Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Panjabi).
First of all you should get the latest dhvani source code from CVS in sourceforge. Compile it and install.
To create an audiobook follow these steps
You need the text in utf-8 format. No need to specify the langauge. Dhvani will detect the langauge automatically.

dhvani -o audiobook.wav textfile
oggenc -B 16 -C 1 -R 16000 audiobook.wav

Now you have a file called audiobook.ogg. If you prefer ogg, then your audiobook is ready. If you want the file in mp3 format

oggdec audiobook.ogg
(This will create a file named audiobook.ogg.wav )
lame --preset 192 -ms -h audiobook.ogg.wav
(install lame if it is not present using your package manager)

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

Dhvani is a winner of FOSS India Awards 2008.
There are 20 winners and more details here.
Indic support for Tuxtype project by Mobin and friends is also a winner. Congrats Mobin and Congrats to all winners!!!
And Thanks to LFY and NRCFOSS

I started a re-write on Dhvani architecture, keeping the algorithm same. This is based on Kiss principle. Instead of client server architecture a single executable is my plan. This will help me to integrate it with KTTS, kate etc. Now I know how to integrate Dhvani with KTTS.
Studied autoconf and automake for this...
More and more items in my TODO list...