
Blabberbot V2 - Art 2008



Hi Guys,
This is an experimental text tto speech program for plain text files written for the Sony PSP.
It was tested with firmware 3.52 M33, and should run on all homebrew compatible firmware versions.

Blabberbot is based ont eh Flite (Festival lite) speech engine PSP port provided by Mypspdev.

The Flite speech engine has a biult in "file to speech" function, but I have taken an approach of
breaking a file down into segments seperated by return characters so that these segments can
be printed to the screen, and so the user can also seek foward and back through the file while
the speaking is in progress. Normally, the function that speaks files cannot be interrupted.

Controls are fairly intuitive. Press Cross at the intro screen to continue,
and select a plain text file for the program to read.
You can save a formatted (Microsoft Word) text file as plain text in most cases within Mocrosoft Word
by selecting "Save as", and then saving as Plain Text, which will remove formating.

While the text file is being spoken, a progress indicator is displayed at the top of the screen,
and left or right on the Dpad can be used to advance the position in the text file forwards, or
reverse the position. The left and right controls are non responsive during speaking,
so they must be held down to be polled between bursts of speech.

Cheers, Art.
bmar8190@bigpond.net.au


Blabberbot V2 (24/11/08):
- Attempted to fix crash on exit problem with late firmware PSP units,
  although untested because this isn't a problem with the test unit.
- Backslash character is filtered from speech, but not from text.
- Pause button implemented.
- New Multi threaded operation makes buttons responsive at all times.
- Program no longer splits words if the screen character buffer fills.
- Program no longer splits single groups with periods such as email addresses.
- Implemented Intrafont for text diaplay.

Blabberbot V1 (23/11/08):
-First release. Experimental debug screen application.





