Listen to Webpages While Driving

dimitril writes "Tired of sitting in your car for hours and practically doing nothing but listening to the radio or the same CD for the fifth time? You could use those hours by reading your websites with this little project. You will love those traffic jams!"

Comments

The developer knows his audience...

[Malfourmed]

The highlighted website featured on the "talker panel" screenshot is slashdot.org with other Geek friendly sites prominent. A case of blatant sucking up or what? Also: "...while you have your first cup of java..."

Re:this reads left to right

[Anonymous Coward]

Proper CSS support (on both ends) could make hiding menus from text readers quite easy.

don't lug around your laptop for that

[g4dget]

It's easier to convert the output of the speech synthesizer to mp3 and use an MP3 player for the car. That way, you don't have to dress up like the Borg to do a fast forward/reverse/skip. The code for dealing with it is also much simpler. Here's a simple 8 line Bash script that downloads a list of URLs and converts them to MP3 files (options are from memory, so double check before using it):

id=0
cat list-of-urls |
while read url; do
lynx -dump $url |
rsynth-say -l temp.pcm
bladeenc -mono -b 32 -rawfreq=8000 -rawbits=16 -rawchannels=2 temp.pcm /card/audio$id.mp3
((id++))
done

You can run this nightly from cron. If you want better speech output, use Festival. You may want to filter the output from "lynx" through a sed script to remove redundant content.

Out of date articles?

[phorm]

This would be a lot nicer once cellular/satellite web becomes more widespread. A lot of what I would like to listen to/hear about is news-type sites, including of course slashdot. A pre-downloaded site wouldn't be overly up-to-date, so for non-specific one would still be better off with the radio.

With a live connection to the internet for news downloads (news should be text only... not too much bandwidth needed), and a decent sounding voice agent, this would be a lot more interesting and useful.

If piped through the car speakers, it also wouldn't be much more distracting than having the radio on to the news, unless you're trying to claim a first-post on slashdot while driving.

glove? complicated software?

[pyrote]

Is this even the best way to acheive this result? I have done research, and implimentation on making computers user-friendly to the blind. I consider a driver blind because except for the momentary glance, there should be NO visual interaction.

Software like Dragon naturally speaking are the best I've found for speech in and out (they do call for a headset). but you can use your favorite flavor of recognition and text-to-speech.

For input, wouldn't it be easier/safer to just mount buttons on the steering wheel? half the cars out already have stereo controls there, why not back, forward, and Read that?

I'm personally building this type of interface for my car, I would NEVER consider using a wired glove (tangle in gearshift) or for that matter a headset (illegal in most states anyway). a reasonably quiet car can handle a mic on the dash and a laptop.

-subnote: seems headphones ARE illegal in California but not utah, figures. I guess drivers can't get any worse here, even with headphones.

-sub-subnote: anyone now any good software to get voice recognition/text-to-speech under linux?
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