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Subject: RE: A thought on the voice UI

RE: A thought on the voice UI

From: Aman Singer <aman_at_asinger.net>
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 10:22:30 -0400

Hi, Rick.
        You said
        It sounds like what you are saying is that the _dirname.talk file
besides
speaking the name of the folder, it would also speak all of the file names
in that particular folder? I am assuming that you don't mean the entire
list of file names would be spoken all at once, but, rather, this file would
be some sort of look-up table, and based on the index number of a particular
file name, RockBox would be able to speak (not spell) the name of a file
while hovering on it when going through a folder? Is that what mean? If
so, that would be awesome!

        I agree that it would be great, but I don't know if it would be
possible. I'm not a programmer either, and I hope someone who knows
something to be different from what I say below will tell us of it.
        Most Archos units have 2 MB of memory. According to Jörg, the lead
writer for the talking UI, the language.voice file has an upper limit of 1.5
megabytes. The rest of the memory is taken up by other things and, though we
may be able to squeeze more memory into the voice file, there is an absolute
2 megabyte limit which is not resolvable without a hardware change which,
though possible, probably is beyond quite a few people.
        I don't know how much of a big deal this would be if we split the
file names into directory wide files. That is, we could have a _dirname.talk
and a _DirFilesList.talk (the file for music would be _MusicFilesList.talk,
the file for audio books would be _audio booksFilesList.talk, etc), which
would contain all the file names. Would the _DirFilesList.talk for each
directory be under 1.5 megabytes? I don't know. It seems at least possible,
though, that it would be.
        Now, the next question is, would it be necessary to have the
language.voice and the _DirFilesList.talk file existing in memory together?
I don't know that, either. It might be worth considering, though. If, for
some reason, the _DirFilesList.talk and language.voice need to be there
together, then I don't see how the memory could be enough for both.
        Thirdly and lastly, the generation of the _DirFilesList.talk might
be interesting. Keep in mind that it would take quite a while, and that
you'd have, if it's to be very useful, to update it with every large group
of files you add to the unit. I don't think that's a big deal, either, but
I'm just pointing out possible pitfalls.
        BTW, I don't know how good a file containing the name for each file
would be. I don't know if size would be an issue, but believe that having
one file with a name for each other file that would be in a directory would
make file browsing very energy intensive, as the drive would be constantly
spinning, grabbing the file names. The single TOC file would be better,
IMHO.
        Aman
  

 

-----Original Message-----
From: rockbox-bounces_at_cool.haxx.se [mailto:rockbox-bounces_at_cool.haxx.se] On
Behalf Of Rick Alfaro
Sent: June 11, 2004 2:58 PM
To: 'Rockbox development'
Subject: RE: A thought on the voice UI

Brian,

Remember that I am not a programmer, so I am simply trying to understand
what you are suggesting.

It sounds like what you are saying is that the _dirname.talk file besides
speaking the name of the folder, it would also speak all of the file names
in that particular folder? I am assuming that you don't mean the entire
list of file names would be spoken all at once, but, rather, this file would
be some sort of look-up table, and based on the index number of a particular
file name, RockBox would be able to speak (not spell) the name of a file
while hovering on it when going through a folder? Is that what mean? If
so, that would be awesome!

Best regards,
 
Rick Alfaro
ralfaro_at_bellsouth.net


-----Original Message-----
From: rockbox-bounces_at_cool.haxx.se [mailto:rockbox-bounces_at_cool.haxx.se] On
Behalf Of Brian Wolven
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 2:15 PM
To: rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se
Subject: Re: A thought on the voice UI


Rick Alfaro wrote:

> Rob,
>
> I don't know anything about writing scripts either, but I took a look
> at the script that generates the folder names in an editor. It is
> using 16 bit 32khz mono for the mp3 encoding.
>
> Also while looking through the rest of the script, although again, I
> am not a programmer, it seems like it could be easily modified to
> generate file names along with folder names if RockBox had the ability
> to pickup on an additional trigger like _filexxxx.voice where xxxx
> would be the number of the file in that particular folder.
>
> Again however, we have to keep in mind that no matter how small the
> file is, it is still going to take up 4k due to cluster sizes.
>
> Anyhow, just something to think about I guess if the RockBox guys ever
> decide to give this a try.

I (and several others) could easily modify the script to do this if it
is ever supported by rockbox. One suggestion I might make - and maybe
Joerg and some of the other devs could explain why it is or isn't a good
idea!) is that the single _dirname.talk clip currently present in each
folder be expanded to include both the foldername *and* the names of the
files in that folder. The talkbox code could then just access the
appropriate mp3 segment to voice the entire folder contents, perhaps
using an internal indexing scheme, based on file order, in the same way
that our current monolithic voice file supports all the menu entries.
There would, of course, have to be additional complexity in the talkbox
code, e.g., error checking (what if user adds or deletes a new file and
doesn't update the .talk file?), but there isn't anything really "new"
here. The scripting is easy to update - it'll just take a little longer
to run (I've got 3,000+ files!).

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Received on 2004-06-12

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