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Release Kodi Screen Reader (Text to speech)
(2015-11-10, 11:55)Darien Wrote:
(2015-11-09, 17:43)ruuk Wrote:
(2015-11-09, 12:33)Darien Wrote: I managed to install osmc and get screen reader add on working. but there's a problem I don't know how to fix. If i keep the pi on and leave it idling, the screen reader stops talking.
So like i've left kodi for 1 hour, when i get back at it, I can hear the navigation sound, but no screen reader

If this the Pi 1, I don't really recommend it for use with the screen reader (or for Kodi in general for that matter). In any case, you should have the screen reader use an external player or have the speech program output directly, rather that have it use the default Kodi PlaySFX method. That seems to have helped this sort of thing in the past.

Hello,
This is a pi 2 actually. I'm new to this so I have no idea, what do you mean by the screen reader being used on an external player?
Currently i hear espeak from my tv speakers, as same as kodi's output.

In Kodi go to System:Settings:Add-ons:My add-ons:Services and click on Kodi Screen Reader. From there click on Configure. You will get a settings dialog. Select 'Default TTS Engine' and choose eSpeak. Change 'Play Speech Directly Via eSpeak' to Yes.

To make these settings more accessible, you can go the the Keymap section in these settings and select 'Install Default Keymap'. Once you've done that, you will be able to access these settings by pressing F6.
For a list key actions this enables, check out this post.
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(2015-11-10, 21:25)ruuk Wrote:
(2015-11-10, 11:55)Darien Wrote:
(2015-11-09, 17:43)ruuk Wrote: If this the Pi 1, I don't really recommend it for use with the screen reader (or for Kodi in general for that matter). In any case, you should have the screen reader use an external player or have the speech program output directly, rather that have it use the default Kodi PlaySFX method. That seems to have helped this sort of thing in the past.

Hello,
This is a pi 2 actually. I'm new to this so I have no idea, what do you mean by the screen reader being used on an external player?
Currently i hear espeak from my tv speakers, as same as kodi's output.

In Kodi go to System:Settings:Add-ons:My add-ons:Services and click on Kodi Screen Reader. From there click on Configure. You will get a settings dialog. Select 'Default TTS Engine' and choose eSpeak. Change 'Play Speech Directly Via eSpeak' to Yes.

To make these settings more accessible, you can go the the Keymap section in these settings and select 'Install Default Keymap'. Once you've done that, you will be able to access these settings by pressing F6.
For a list key actions this enables, check out this post.
Hi there!
Thanks for the instructions. I did all of that, + allowed the screen reader to speak while media is playing. I also went onto OSMC program and overclocked my raspberry pi to turbo.
Now my system is less sluggish and screen reader won't be muted if i idle the device.
Some new problem appeared though. I'm not sure if it's my device limitations, or it's a known issue. whenever Espeak speaks a long text, (for example kodi errors) the second part of the text becomes... kind of slow, distorted with cut outs.
for example:
"Error. The source file is not available. could not connect to the server. w-w-o-uld y-y-ou l-liik-kee t-to c-co-ontinue?"
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I don't think I've experienced that before.

Does it return to normal after?

Does it always begin at the start of a sentence?
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It will return to normal after the end of the message, or if i hit control to stop it.

No it will not begin at the beginning of a sentence, It always happens when the sentence is a bit long, so after espeak first pauses in the middle of a message, It suddenly becomes like that. I don't know if espeak pauses or this problem creates a pause there.
It is constent, so If i keep reading the sentence over and over i manage to get most of it read with the normal speech. But it always happens with long speech lines.
TBH, I will test this more - I'm not sure if this happens after a period or a punctuation or not.
I also think that this started to happen when i set espeak for direct output (the one that you instructed me to do at above posts)
I'll upload a sample recording of it happening tomorrow
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(2015-11-11, 21:44)Darien Wrote: It will return to normal after the end of the message, or if i hit control to stop it.

No it will not begin at the beginning of a sentence, It always happens when the sentence is a bit long, so after espeak first pauses in the middle of a message, It suddenly becomes like that. I don't know if espeak pauses or this problem creates a pause there.
It is constent, so If i keep reading the sentence over and over i manage to get most of it read with the normal speech. But it always happens with long speech lines.
TBH, I will test this more - I'm not sure if this happens after a period or a punctuation or not.
I also think that this started to happen when i set espeak for direct output (the one that you instructed me to do at above posts)
I'll upload a sample recording of it happening tomorrow

Well, it isn't really punctuation that I'm wondering about (though I suppose it could possibly have an effect) as much as multiple lines (which are usually one for each sentence in this context). I'm not really sure what to make of it if that is the case, but every bit of info helps Smile

You might try disabling 'Play Speech Directly Via eSpeak' and setting a Player (to something other than XBMC PlaySFX) and see if that changes anything.
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hello, can anyone tell me how to start kodi scream reader on apple t v.
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(2015-11-11, 23:42)b rap Wrote: hello, can anyone tell me how to start kodi scream reader on apple t v.

It's not really supported on the Apple TV. I experimented with it quite a while ago, and wasn't able to get anything working decently.
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Hi, I have been trying out Kodi and TTS on a couple of machines before attempting installing TTS on an Android box which looks very complicated. My current problem is that I had a working configuration on OSX but while I was looking around in the TTS configuration I selected Google speech, for a few moments the VoiceOver voice changed to a female voice and Kodi crashed. When i restarted Kodi I had no speech. In order to fix things I removed Kodi and then reinstalled it copying the Ruuk repo and the TTS addon into the addons folder. After restarting I still have no speech. I can't see where OSX can be keeping the old data for the prior instillation, any suggestions?
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Hi SandFly, unfortunately KodiTTS doesn't work on Android. It is mostly limited to OSX or Windows as your best options, However, it also works well on the PI 2 running Linux. The Google Speech option is for using googles online text to speech option if you have no other choices. As far as why it crashed, Really can't tell you without looking at logs. Kodis Userdata folder is hidden by default in OSX, However it would be located in
Code:
/Users/<your_user_name>/Library/Application Support/Kodi/userdata/

Here is a link on how to unhide it.
http://kodi.wiki/view/Mac_FAQ#Lion_userdata
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Thanks Traker1001 , regarding the screen reader on an Android box, I thought it possible using an external speech server. But this does look complicated to set up to me with little experience.
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I had set it up myself once, for a while, It was fairly complicated. Unfortunately there are no online services for speech that I would depend on, At least not yet. If Google would stop delaying on me, That might change at some point.
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Hi all!

I recently installed Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 2 with XBian. It looks nice so far, but I have some problems with speech.

I installed eSpeak and the Alsa-Utils. As player I selected aplay. Now I have some problems: At the beginning of a word there is something missing. Normally it would say "Window, main menu, videos", but I hear only "ow, main menu, deos". It looks like the first second or so is not played if there is some pause. I'm not sure if I describe it correctly. Maybe I make a recording of this?

So I played with the settings of the Kodi Screen Reader and it looks like that I have minimized the problem, but not entirely solved it. I enabled "Pipe audio through player" and changed the polling time in the advanced settings to 500 ms. It is much better now, but still there.

Does anyone know this problem and how to solve it? This is really annoying.

Regards!
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I'm sorry I am not much help on this one. When I was playing with Xebian, Alsa and Espeak on the Pi1 I was having the same exact issue. days of messing with settings and re-installs and such I never actually managed to solve the issue. Best I could do was, like you get it minimized. I assumed it was a processing issue with the PI1 and Xebian, But that shouldn't be the case with the Pi2. If you get it figured out, Please let us know.

I will note, however, I was able to use it with pulseaudio.
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Hi guys,

I recently tried to setup kodi 15.1 on my ubuntu-gnome 15.10. The installation of kodi via aptitude was quite easy but I wasn't able to set up kodi-screenreader as a blind person. There I ran in to a never ending circle:
a) to set up the kodi screen reader, I have to navigate through the menus of kodi.
b) Orca can't access the menus of kodi so I have to install the kodi screen reader to have access to the menus (see a)

Imho, there are some ways to break out of his circle. This could be done in future versions of kodi-screenreader (or future versions of kodi).

- One way could be to install kodi-screen-reader via the package manager aptitude.
- another way is an administrative web interface which can be accessed from the linux console via lynx. The lynx is quite accessible with brlty or yasr and you don't have to access th on screen menus of kodi to make the on-screen menus of kodi accessible:-). I was able to enable the webinterface following these instructions: http://kodi.wiki/view/Web_interface#Manu...te_control but i wasn't able to install kodi-screenreader using this web interface:-(.
- the best way could be the integration of the custom-key-maps and the screen reader into future versions of kodi. If kodi-screenreader is a part of kodi, a blind person could simply press f12 to switch the screen reader on or off. a sighted person can use kodi as usual.
- The json api could be another way to install and activate kodi-screenreader. According to the json api documentation, there are no methods to install and activate the add-on (neither in V2 http://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v2 nor in v4 http://kodi.wiki/view/JSON-RPC_API/v4 )

Is there a way to install the add-on as a blind person? Do you plan to integrate the screen reader into kodi?



gretings

Dave
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(2015-12-09, 17:29)Traker1001 Wrote: I will note, however, I was able to use it with pulseaudio.

Hmmm, I don't know much about pulseaudio. I'll try to install it and see what happens. If it does not break anything, like DTS and AC3 passthrough, I'll leave it.

One thing I noticed was, with XBMC Player selected there are no such issues. Also the volume seams to be different. As if the XBMC Player uses a completely different audio device. Is that possible? Just an observation.

Regards!
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