Dunkelstern Mobile Blog

Hi, today I am writing in english for all programmer fellows...

I just finished a small project for extending Skype for Linux. It's a simple text to speech application that speaks out (german) chatmessages from your buddies. On the run to this I created a simple to use interface to the Skype X11 transport API you can use for your own projects if you like.

As I could not find any C only sample sourcecode for the X11 transport API I decided to roll my own implementation. Feel free to look into it if you want. Grab the tarball at http://dunkelstern.no-ip.org/skypespeak-0.1.tar.bz2
(That's my home server, so please don't slashdot it... just kidding)

The text to speech engine used is "mbrola" as it is the best (only?) available speech synthesis application for linux and german text. Sadly neither "mbrola" itself nor "txt2pho", that does the ponetic splitting, are open source (why?).

So to get the application running you'll have to download these apps from the net and copy them to the right locations by hand (see INSTALL in the tarball for further instructions)

Have fun experimenting with it.