Good meeting 1

Met Chris earlier today to go thru’ my project. Told him of my problems with speech and J2ME. He agrees with me, if the phone can play music, why can’t we get it to read text messages. We also pretty much kicked the Windows Mobile idea into touch to as I don’t think I’ve got enough time to learn C++ between now and handin time. So, we went thru everything that mobile phones can do. We talked about stills and video, text, getting data to and from a server and hit upon the idea of skills exchange. For example, I build you a website and you sort out my central heating – only if you’re a plumber coz if you ain’t, you’re not coming anywhere near my pipes. One of the problems with this system is if you’re good at what you do, you’ll likely end up in credit with nothing to spend your points on. The system will have to have some sort of scheme to even out the share as it were but speaking from experience, when you find a good plumber, you hang onto them so I guess if the tradesman has a lot of points, then they must be good.

But, it did get me thinking and I’m wondering if instead of a skills exchange, the system is a files exchange. A bit like peer-to-peer but obviously phone-to-phone and you don’t just take files, you have to be prepared to swap, a bit like Panini stickers I guess. (Did you see how I did that? Managed to get yet another football reference in, it’s a skill) The user registers what files they’re prepared to swap and can browse files from other users before organising a trade. I know text messages are stored in hidden folders but I wonder if that’s the same with other types of files. Looks as though I’m researching again.

PS I’ve not given up on the speech-phone thingy. I’m still gonna keep working on it but I think the “go-live” date will be quite some time in the future.

Windoze Mobile

I’ve turned my attention to smart phones. As they tend to run a mini version of Windows, they have better memory management as well as having larger memories so could be a good platform for speech. I’ve tracked down a speech synthesiser that will run under Windows, I’ve gotta buy it (there’s a surprise) but there’s a 30 day demo version which ought to be enough time to see if it’s worth pursuing. Development for Windows Mobile needs to be done in C++ which is a bit scarey. Not sure if I’m gonna have enough time to learn a new language to the level that I’m gonna need it by Easter. Still, there’s only one way to find out I guess.

Slight problem

I’ve been researching speech synthesis and, as yet, there is nothing for mobile devices. Which does beg the question why? I’ve been looking at FreeTTS. It’s open source, written in Java so should be ideal for what I want to do except the demo apps all seem to make reference to things outside of itself. Not that big a deal as most phones can access the net so any files/classes needed could be stored on a central server. There are 2 configurations for J2ME; Connected, Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) and Connected Device Configuration (CDC). CLDC needs a 16 or 32bit processor and up to 512kb of memory whereas CDC needs 2MB memory and a 32bit processor such as can be found in PDAs. Voice data for a synthesiser is around 2-16MB so it looks as though the problem is down to the size. I guess if FreeTTS needs to access a central server anyway, the size could be reduced however, J2ME isn’t a full version of Java. It doesn’t support javax.sound and I don’t think the beeps you can get it to play are gonna be enough.

CDC looks a possibility but will involve quite a major hack of FreeTTS as well as finding a device that has it. More research is needed by the looks of it.

VoiceXML

I’ve just discovered another interesting speech synthesis technology – VoiceXML. Essentially it’s XML for applications such as voice browsers. What is particularly interesting is, you could set up 2-way communication using it and SMS. Not quite sure where this is going, maybe it’s a side project rather than the main one.