Hey everyone! As we, the Artikulate team, are targeting to release Artikulate this fall, we would like to invite more and more contributors to come help us with the project (which is aimed at helping users with their language learning/pronunciation skills). :-)
This week, we would like to have contributors for our ‘American English’ Course. If you are a fluent American(US) English speaker, it would be great if you could please lend your voice for the recordings in the particular course. All you need to do is visit the Artikulate tech-base, wherein you will find the details for preparing your system to start contributing to Artikulate and the procedure for adding recordings to a language of your choice (American English, in this case). So, don’t wait, start recording. ;-)
For help/guidance, please feel free to contact us through Freenode IRC at the #kde-artikulate channel. Cheers! \o/
Although the kde-us mailing list does not seem to be active, perhaps you can give it a try, just in case.
You have nothing to lose. ;-)
Sure, we could do that. Thanks a lot. :)
I’d be willing, but there are questions/complications. I run OpenSuSE 12.3 and the only QTMultimedia I see in the distro is for Qt5. I don’t think I’m ready to build Qt modules, especially as I use Qt myself.
Are you looking for someone to read to you or encode phonemes? The latter seems much more difficult.
My only language is American English, and I’m quite fluent. I grew up spending the school year just north of New York City and summers in rural Alabama; as a result, I speak in “newscaster” American English (similar to Californian but minus the “like”s and “dude”s et al.) so it’s relatively noninflected.
As a sometime actor and director I’m sensitive to the flow and rhythm of language. As a former project manager of international projects I’m VERY familiar with the problems caused by differing pronunciations, especially those caused by differing syllabification, emphasis and “music” (rhythm and flow).
You may also need to think about word choice in your sentences and paragraphs to be translated. Consider that Irish-English speakers choose words that almost allow their sentences to be sung, while most Americans pay little attention to that. Even simpler is the use of contractions: It is formally correct to use “it is” when speaking, but it’s more common for Americans to automatically substitute “it’s”.
Hey Tom, great to hear that you are interested!
Regarding compiling Artikulate: QtMultimedia is shipped in the qtmobility package in the old 4.8 times. I think there exists a package for OpenSuse (but I am not familiar with their package structure…)
Regarding recordings: we created a blueprint/skeleton for a basic language course where the sentences can easily be adapted to the language flow of a native speaker. This could be even required, since the sekeltons are created by non-native speakers (in every other language they are translated by a native speaker, English is a special case here :)
We use phonemes (which are smallest hearable sounds of a language) to tag sentences.
So the translations are already there and we just have to read them?
Yeah.
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Hi Oinig,
If you make a similar call for Thai speakers, I’ll contribute a set of ~500 words. I am learning thai right now and am using parley for that. But I lack the spoken version a lot. I don’t think converting my file from kvtml to the Artikulate file format should be any problem.
Thanks. That would be great! :)
By the way, did you notice that your blog https://oinig.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/artikulate-ing-it-right/ contains a comment from a volunteer who is a native US English speaker?
Thanks a lot! I completely forgot about that comment.
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OK, I’ve spent about a day on this and no joy.
Qt-Mobility is not part of the standard OpenSuSE repositories. I managed to find it on the Open Build Service, but it won’t install because it needs libqmf… which I gather is Qt Messaging Framework and not a part of Qt per se. Apparently it’s used in email handling and comes out of Qt-Labs.
Is QMF actually required? if so, it’ll be hard for OpenSuSE users to adopt. Please suggest to the developers that choosing to use QMF as the communication vehicle may not have been ideal.
I’d like to help but I’m blocked at this point.
Hi Tom, we will add an optional QtGStreamer backend (which is much better available on OpenSuSe systems). This should be done in 1-2 weeks.
Thanks! Add a comment here when its ready and I’ll jump on it.
Today I merged a cmake build option called “NO_QTMULTIMEDIA”. When set, Artikulate requires QtGStreamer as capture backend. It’s only in the master branch.
using cmake-gui as per instructions.
1) checked the NO_QTMULTIMEDIA box
2) ran “Configure”
ran into:
Found Qt-Version 4.8.4 (using /usr/bin/qmake)
Found X11: /usr/lib64/libX11.so
Found KDE 4.10 include dir: /usr/include
Found KDE 4.10 library dir: /usr/lib64
Found the KDE4 kconfig_compiler preprocessor: /usr/bin/kconfig_compiler
Found automoc4: /usr/bin/automoc4
Could NOT find QtMobility (missing: QTMOBILITY_INCLUDE_DIR QTMOBILITY_MULTIMEDIAKIT_INCLUDE_DIR QTMOBILITY_MULTIMEDIAKIT_LIBRARY)
Boost hasn’t been found yet. Looking…
Boost version: 1.49.0
GCC 4.5 or later detected. Enabling C++0x support in QTGSTREAMER_FLAGS.
Build with alternative backend QtGStreamer
CMake Error: The following variables are used in this project, but they are set to NOTFOUND.
Please set them or make sure they are set and tested correctly in the CMake files:
QTMOBILITY_INCLUDE_DIR (ADVANCED)
used as include directory in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
used as include directory in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
used as include directory in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
used as include directory in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
QTMOBILITY_MULTIMEDIAKIT_INCLUDE_DIR (ADVANCED)
used as include directory in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
used as include directory in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
used as include directory in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
used as include directory in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
QTMOBILITY_MULTIMEDIAKIT_LIBRARY (ADVANCED)
linked by target “artikulate” in directory /home/tom/Documents/Packages/Artikulate/artikulate/src
Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
Just changed the error reporting to avoid showing errors when QtMultimedia is not found but QtGStreamer shall be used.
Thanks for noting this!
I’ve just re-cloned the master branch and have the same error. What am I missing?
Strange… Can you please check
* QtGStreamer libraries development are installed
* delete CMake-Cache
And if this does not help, please send me the complete CMake-Output to cordlandwehr@kde.org
PS: Could you join the IRC channel #kde-artikulate at freenode? Or do you use any instant messengers? That could make it way easier for solving this problem ;)