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Thai Students Score a Prize For Speech Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the illiterate?-write-for-free-help dept.

Julie188 writes "A team of four Thai students beat out 10,000 competitors to win the $25,000 prize in the Microsoft 2007 Imagine Cup. Their project is text-to-speech software in which computers read aloud typed and handwritten commands. The software will allow people who can't read to interact with a PC. Imagine Cup judge Rand Morimoto has been blogging on the whole experience — from his video of the opening ceremonies to how contestants swilled free Cokes to keep themselves awake during the 24-hour, no-sleep phase of the competition."

10 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Re:You mean... by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yep, they just won $25,000 from Microsoft for Reinventing the wheel!. I first saw this technology demonstrated on the TI99/4a in 1979- 28 years ago!

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  2. article by Kenji+DRE · · Score: 3, Informative

    I can't find anywhere in the article mentioning about the Thai students.....

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    1. Re:article by FRiC · · Score: 2, Informative

      The blog only talks about the IT Challenge category, which is about maintaining and using Windows. The Thai students won the Software Design category. The complete list of winners is here.

  3. Re:Microsoft by andrewd18 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm aware that this is Slashdot and we can't have anything positive said about Microsoft, but you could at least show the full story, not just the biased, edited clip.

    Here's the full clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX8oYoYy2Gc

    Yes, it's not perfect. But no, it's not as bad as that clip makes it.

  4. More useful links... by Otter · · Score: 4, Informative
    Not that the absence of any information in the linked blog about the winning project has kept people from idiotic disparagement of it, but for those who like to know a little about what they're idiotically disparaging:

    Imagine Cup home page

    Press release about the winners

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    1. Re:More useful links... by mscoder610 · · Score: 5, Informative
      I just came back from the Imagine Cup software design competition, and I saw the presentations for the top 6 software design finalists. More details about the Software Design part of the Imagine Cup:
      • The "24 hours straight through" part of the story doesn't apply to Software Design. It applies to some other of the challenges like Algorithms, Photography, and Short Film.
      • Software Design teams came up with the idea themselves (to improve education), and had multiple months to work on it.
      • Thailand's winning solution isn't just a text-to-speech thing, as the story implies. What it basically does is: Someone with their program and a webcam can place any book in front of the webcam. Their solution not only applies the text-to-speech stuff (for people who can't read the words), but it also tries to make the book more "visual". On a single page, it basically looks through each sentence for the main ideas of it, i.e. actions and verbs. Then it tries to show those ideas visually, with a picture or video. It was a pretty neat project.
      Hopefully that clears things up a little. I looked around for a page with a full description of their project, but I wasn't able to find one.
  5. Re:You mean... by Solra+Bizna · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...MacInTalk came with late versions of System 6. Also, what the crap does text-to-speech synthesis have to do with full interaction for the visually impaired? Did you even click on my link? _-_

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  6. doesn't windows already have this feature? by Cyko_01 · · Score: 2, Informative

    correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that what the narrator in WinXP does? How is this new and innovative? Text-to-speech has been out for years!

    1. Re:doesn't windows already have this feature? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      The version in XP sucks, badly, so badly in fact that the blind end up paying around 600 dollars for software that works. The stuff in Vists is actually a bit better. But not by enough. Microsoft really needs to integrate better software into Vista, or at least offer something that doesn't cost more than say, a monitor.

      Linux, incidentally, is supposed to be halway decent with it's built in text-to=speech, but is suffering badly due to lack of driver support for the current generation of harware accessability devices coupled with the removal of serial ports, which are necessary for the ones that do work.

  7. scribd, festival by bcrowell · · Score: 2, Informative
    There's an FOSS text-to-speech system called festival, which sounds robotic, but intelligible. There's a debian package.

    For better free-as-in-beer text-to-speech, try scribd.com. If you upload some text there, they'll automatically make an audio version, and I thought the quality was amazingly good. (If the text is copyrighted, you can set it to be available only to yourself.)

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