Public Site - Under Construction!
Current Version - with timeline
Current Version - with timeline (using an alternative google voices hack (chunking utterances into little peices)). Needs some work though a promising result as it does handle long texts that the original can't.
Dygraph test page -- Obo test page (large DB access, has required adjustment to allowable memory to become stable, will be replaced with a file download or alternative representation of the data)
Dygraph obv test page (v3)
Timelines test page
Tests for dygraph - canvas based charting
obo wordcounts v1
obv wordcounts
obv wordcounts with offence catagory series and filtering example
obo wordcounts from API load - this one is tempramental (even just the api call that feeds it) at the moment - server logs not yet checked for problem though I suspect it times out or exceeds size limits
Initial models media and scripting examples – no text to speech features.
Court
Court more light
Court higher quality jpegs
Court ink and paint textures
No textures
Court with info signs
No Textures 2
renders (stills)
print media
Links in this Column are old version - These are only preserved for the benefit of recording progress - The current version should contain the accumulation of this work.
I hear voices - 1 - Textured (Ubuntu Chrome)
I hear voices - 2 - No Textures (Ubuntu Chrome)
I hear voices - 3 - Textured (mac Chrome)
I hear voices - 4 - No Textures (mac Chrome)
I hear singing - 5 - Textured (mac Chrome)
I hear voices - 6 - Textured (windows Chrome)
Speech Synthesis tests (1) – Experimenting with the W3C Web Speech API using commonly available speech synthesisers provided by web browsers. The target application is a large set of utterances/speech-acts taken from historical sources. Text to speech could provide a convenient and low resource solution for spoken representation. Use of common web browser technology provides widespread availability and ongoing improvements to the technology will improve quality over time. Future work may explore alternative systems and recordings of human actors to attempt improved sonic quality and listener experience. The current design choices favour avoiding attempted realism to reduce the misrepresentations this can create.
The outcome of these tests was the decision to use the speech synthesis features provided by Google Chrome, Chrome voices reproduced the words and abbreviations present in the sample data with greater (subjective) success than alternative synthesisers. There was no standard set of voices available during testing, operating systems and browsers varied considerably - Which means it is currently necessary to add selection logic to handle the variations.
A problem associated with using text to speech in web browsers is the number of voices available, in one case this meant only 1 male and one female voice was available, as a result manipulation of pitch and speed variables was attempted to distinguished between the characters in the trial.
A significant issue affecting the use of Google voices is that working with them required non-standard code, without these workarounds the synthesiser become unresponsive and blocked when reproducing long passages. The workarounds interfere with the operation of standard compliant synthesisers, so additional selection logic is required to overcome the differences. Fixing this is not a priority at the moment, the issue appears to be a bug/error in the Chrome voices speech synthesis engine.
The singing versions will only work if your system provides the selected voices, in my case these were only available on my Apple computer, my interest in the singing voices is that the performance reproduce the words at a slower speed than the spoken ones, which may affect consumption of the story. Firefox on a Linux machine used during this section of development included a selection of regional UK dialects.
Speech Synthesis tests (2) – 12 trials - Implement the findings from the first set of tests across a larger set of test data. Pending changes include automating voice selection logic.
I hear voices - 7 - Textured (Ubuntu Chrome)
I hear voices - 8 - Speaker indication: No Textures (Ubuntu Chrome)
I hear voices - 9 - Speaker indication: No Textures (mac Chrome)
I hear Singing - 10 - Speaker indication: No Textures (mac Chrome)
I hear voices - 11 - Speaker indication: Textures (Ubuntu Chrome)
*I hear voices - 12 - Speaker indication: Textures (mac Chrome)