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

When will these journalists understand the difference between the _Hacker_ and Cracker?
See these two news
1. ADMK website hacked again
2. Hacker who stole bank details held
3. Goa govt web site hacked by Turkish hacker


Dear journalists, Could you please find time to read these?
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/IfYouAre#journalist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Hackers
Hackers are not Crackers

Learning how to type in our own Mother tongue is always a problem for newbies. Usually we will just use English as "yeh kya hey" while chatting/mailing. It is because of this reason the transliteration based input methods are more popular than the Inscript in some languages. Google recently released their Indic transliterate service, a web based text editor which will take English words and convert to Indic languages with the help of some machine learning.
But as far as a normal user is concerned there are many things missing there. It works only if you are online, the suggestions it is listing for English words are often wrong words with spelling mistakes, not a free software etc..
It is in this context, I tried to develop a Desktop application which will act as transliteration based text editor with almost all features of Google transliterate and with some extra features. The project is called as 'Sulekha", meaning "one who writes well"
What is Sulekha
Sulekha is a GTK based text editor. It transliterated the English words to Malayalam (It is not only designed for Malayalam. but I started it for Malayalam) when user types space/newline. If the transliterated word is an actual Malayalam word , Sulekha will replace the English word with the Malayalam word. Other wise we will try to get an exact match from the dictionary we have. If there are multiple words which matches the transliterated word, we will show it as an option list, just like a spell checker. If there is no suggestions, there is a onscreen keyboard, using that user can type using mouse and we will add that new word to the dictionary. Thereby Sulekha learns new words.

If one experienced user wants to use type some words using any input methods, we can disable the sulekha algorithm as well. Then it works as a normal text editor. Sulekha uses Aspell for word learning and suggestions. There is a transliteration engine which transliterated the word to a particular language.
So it is possible to extend Sulekha to any language having Aspell word list. Just need to write one transliteration engine which it language specific. Sulekha editor is a hack on the gtkspell library code which works as a basis for GEDIT text editor. If possible, we can think about a web based sync of word lists also.

The project is not complete, but the code is available in the GIT repository of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing at Savannah
To build the code;
./configure
make

To run:
For editor :
sulekha
For commandline transliterator
sulekha englishword_to_transliterate


This is the TODO list of Sulekha as of now
1. Onscreen keyboard- Coding and Integration
2. Session dictionary/System dictionary Handling
3. Fixing some bugs in Transliteration system, especially the letters after Chillu.- need a small correction in the algorithm
4. Implementing the Editor Menu functions, File Handling
5. Tuning Aspell configuration for the Edit distance optimization for the best suggestions, Currently the suggestion list is too big and suggestion words include words with more than 2 edit distance.
6. Handling the edit inside the word
7. Web Integration

If you are interested in this project/adding new language support please contact santhosh00 at gmail.com

Happy Hacking!!!

I am sure that many of you are fans of "The Matrix" series. And many of you might be using the Matrix Screensavers in your system.
But did you ever think like this: "Why cant that glowing green glyphs that rains in black screen be Indic ?"
Well, Not a bad Idea. Right?
Ok, Shall we try to hack the glmatrix screen saver? Here you go!

1. Download the xscreensaver sourcecode from http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/download.html

2. Configure and make it(just to ensure that you have required libraries in your machine)

3. Goto hacks/images folder of that source code. You will see matrix3.xpm file there. Backup it , it is valuable:)

4. I am going to use Hindi glyphs(You can use the glyphs from your mother tongue).Now we need to create one xpm image file with same dimension and size of the original one. Write one html page with table and arrange the alphabets there. Note the table should be a 512*598 pixels 13 rows, 16 columns.

5. Refer the following Hindi table. Take a screenshot of the html and get the table alone. You may use the source code of the below table for your language.

!

@

#

$

%

^

&

*

(

)

_

+

,

/

.

अ

ॐ

इ

ई

उ

ऊ

ऋ

ऍ

ऎ

ऍ

ओ

औ

ओ

त

य

क

कु

नु

रु

प

न

भ

ह

ज

प

र

चु

स

पु

ध

य

म

न

ल

र‍

अ

इ

उ

ल

र

म

व

कू

ऋ

उ

आ

य

न

न

ज

त

ग

धा

न

अ

त

०

४

क

त

झ

ध

ऴ

क

२

क

म

क्ष

छ

क

छ

क

@

(

)

_

+

,

/

.

*

!

@

#

$

​​​​~

÷

ॐ

६

७

८

¾

¶

,

¼

½

१

२

३

४

५

ओ

आ

छ

य़

फ

थ

क्ष

च

क

पो

नु

क

त

त

रू

भू

र

जुु

गुु

सु

मु

नि

षि

वी

उ

ऋ

त

अ

आ

इ

ई

उ

ऊ

ऋ

ऍ

ऎ

ऍ

ओ

औ

ओ

अ

त

स

ह

ळ

क्ष

र

औ

ठ

ळ‍

ण

क

ॐ

ट

ब

फ

३

५

ॐ

क

ख

ग

घ

ध

च

छ

ज

झ

ण

&

ऍ

ऑ

ज्ञ

श्र

ऎ

थ

द

ध

ण

प

क

ब

भ

म

य

र

ल

व

श

ङ

ष

6. Open GIMP and create a new image with image with 512*598 pixel size. paste the table screenshot on the blank image. You can save it as matrix3.xpm file.

7. From my experiments I found that the image should be the mirror copy of the the table image.So flip the image horizontally to get the mirror image and save

8. You can see that the size of the image around 601 KB. But the actual image should be around 301 KB file. Go to Layers-> Colours->posterize. And give the number of colours as 91 (some value around 90). Save it.

9. Now you have the matrix glyph image ready.

10. goto hacks/glx folder. Apply the below patch to glmatrix.c

1079c1079
< XSCREENSAVER_MODULE_2 ("GLMatrix", glmatrix, matrix)
---
> XSCREENSAVER_MODULE_2 ("Hindi Matrix", glmatrix, matrix)

11. Recompile it! Done? No, wait. We need to add this as a screensaver to Gnome-screensaver
12. Create one Hindi Matrix.desktop file in usr/share/applications/screensavers folder. Here is my file

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Hindi Matrix
Comment=Draws 3D dropping characters similar to what is seen in the title sequence of "The Matrix", written by Jamie Zawinski. This is a Hindi glyph version written by Santhosh Thottingal.
TryExec=himatrix
Exec=himatrix -root -speed 5.0 -density 50
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Screensaver
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=xscreensaver

13. Copy the glmatrix binary to usr/lib/xscreensaver/himatrix.

14. Now go to System-> preferences -> Screensave. Your screensaver should be listed there. See my screenshot






You can download Hindi and Malayalam matrix deb package from here

Happy Hacking!!!