The listeners of
yesterday s episode of
Venty s
Hackerfunk radio show on
Radio
LoRa already know and heard it: We made
identi.ca talk. And we did it
with help of other microbloggers. (The podcast version of this
Hackerfunk episode will be online in a few days, too. Will link it
here and either Venty or me will post it on identi.ca, too, as soon as
it s published.)
A few weeks ago we thought about how we could show
microblogging on
the radio. With identi.ca s
Jabber (
XMPP) interface we have real time
access, and so the idea was born to pipe all incoming dents into a
speech synthesis system.
Then we tried to figure out which tools would be appropriate. Quite
fast, people on identi.ca as well as on the
LUGS IRC (e.g.
bones0)
pointed us to
festival and
espeak. We found no support for German in festival,
so we went for espeak although festival would have had the
advantage of the existence of a
festival
plugin for the popular multiprotocol messenger
Pidgin.
Next step was more difficult than expected: How to make a tail -f of
XMPP incoming messages? Something like
rsstail, just for
XMPP.
Although using the IM to
IRC gateway
Bitlbee (as I use it myself) and
using tail -f (or better
inotail -f ) on the
IRC client s log file
(
ii
comes to my mind for such purposes) would have been an option, nobody
had the idea at that time.
And since
@deepspawn conjured xmpptail in less than two hours we happily
took it.
xmpptail (tar.gz) is written in
Python and uses
Twisted Words (
Debian package
python-twisted-words) as
XMPP libraries.
I had to patch xmpptail slightly for unbuffered I/O, Unicode support
and for removing things we don t want to hear on the radio as follows,
but it worked more or less out of the box.
--- xmmptail.py 2009-02-25 20:47:48.000000000 +0100
+++ xmpptail.py 2009-03-07 18:48:57.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#!/usr/bin/python
+#!/usr/bin/python -u
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# author: Carlos A. Perilla
# This file is part of Jance bot.
@@ -65,7 +65,8 @@
body = unicode(e.__str__())
break
- print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+# print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+ print("%s" % (body.encode('utf-8')))
def authfailedEvent(xmlstream):
@@ -80,9 +81,9 @@
dprint('Got something: %s -> %s' % (el.name, str(el.attributes)))
if __name__ == '__main__':
- print "Starting"
+ #print "Starting"
execfile('tailconf')
- print USER_HANDLE
+ #print USER_HANDLE
me = USER_HANDLE + "/xmpptail"
myJid = jid.JID(me)
server = USER_HANDLE[USER_HANDLE.find('@')+1:]
So after configuring xmpptail to use the hackerfunk Jabber account, we
successfully ran the following script during the radio show:
./xmpptail.py while read LINE; do
if [ "$LINE" = "empty" ]; then
continue;
fi;
echo $LINE
echo $LINE tee -a xmpp-espeak.log espeak --stdin -v de;
done
At the end of the show,
@rebugger found this
howto
which describes very detailed how to get festival working together
with the non-free ( non-free as in
DFSG)
MBROLA project which offers
also the appropriate files for German. But because of how much work
this would be to get it running, I currently prefer to stay with
espeak for German speech synthesis .
Next step would be to use
mnoGosearch s mguesser
to detect the language of a dent and run espeak (or whatever
text-to-speech system is appropriate for the guessed language) with
the appropiate options for that language, because otherwise many
dents sound really funny. ;-)
Update, 15:02:
Venty gave the whole system the
name Identibla .
the number of 
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