We live in an era of rapidly developing information technologies. Computers and the internet make finding information easier than ever before. Unfortunately not everyone can fully benefit from this: a vast amount of information is available in only textual form, making it difficult or even impossible for visually impaired and dyslexic persons to access it. Special tools for vocalizing textual information can be of great assistance to them, and a valuable tool for sighted people as well.
The goal of this project is to design and implement speech APIs that are easy to extend and use with a variety of speech engines on different operating systems. JSAPI (Java Speech API) serves as a base for the project. Proposed by Sun Microsystems, JSAPI consists of a set of well defined interfaces for Java classes and the speech markup language JSML. No implementation of JSAPI is provided by Sun. The few available implementations of JSAPI, firstly, do not have the full set of features that may be needed for speech enabled applications and, secondly, are limited to a specific speech engine and operating system.
This project takes significant steps towards solving these problems.