Saturday, January 31, 2015

Why Ph.D s do not teach in slums

Over this long time of absence with me living on another plane of existance I saw something strange. The most educated people in our country which is arguably any Ph.D. holder never venture near slums.

The teachers of children in slums are mostly people out of a job. A few exceptions exist where the person is truly passionate about the esence of teaching. Watching the old serial of chanakya neeti I am reminded of a scene. A powerful man has just insulted Chanakya and once again he reached deep into his arsenal of knowledge and speaks.

"I am a teacher. In my lap and in my lap only does the future play. I hold bothe the power of progress and downfall of any nation for I influence the minds of tomorrow."

This led me to think. A single teacher in school, over a period of 10 years and while handling a class of approximateley 40 children influences 400 children (Give or take a few).We have a responsibility to provide the best teachers to the students at an age when they are most impressionable. In my opinion teachers required for lower classes must be equally if not more qualified than the ones in higher classes.

If this is not followed then it is easy to conclude that the teachers in higher institutions have to spend a lot of time undoing the damage done by lower classes.So back to the title. Why do Ph.D. s not teach in slums. The one place where only education can uplift the people is devoid of the people how that can be done.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Tongues-Text to speech in python

I am pleased to say that Tongues is almost ready.
Tongues is my text to speech engine written entirely in python 3.4

Text To Speech
Text to speech engines are software/hardware that read out text. Good examples are Microsoft Sam etc. These are very handy for people who cannot see or are multitasking to a level where they want stuff to be read out to them. It is also very cool to have your computer speaking a language you can understand.

  1. Provides for a new interface with the computer. Now you can use mouse+keybard and also speak at the same time.
  2. Sounds awesome when you tell people how your computer reads your email to you.
  3. We can finally get somewhere near Her.
Python 3.4

I have chosen python because of the loveable community and the beautiful abstraction it presents. Plus it is clear. Python 3.4 is just the latest python version that came out when i started this project.

Tongues

Tongues is a very simple text to seech engine. It does only english for now. I am hosting the source on github. The name comes from my effort to try and make this lanuage independent and offline at the same time. This means I have to extensive reading and research and experiments before I write even a single line of code. Keeping the engine language independent means that I have to take care of accents and dialects etc besides the language.

How i made tongues:
  1. I wrote a crawler to crawl the internet and collect english words.
  2. I wrote a script to read every word and count the pairs of letters that occur in english.
    1. In word "admire"  there are pairs ad-dm-mi-ir-re
    2. Now in all the words i collected i counted how many times a pair occurs.
    3. Sort the pairs according to popularity.
  3. Now record sounds for the pairs.There are about 500 in English
  4. The recording is done using words that contain maximum number of popular pairs.
  5. Create an engine that blends them properly and in proper order.
  6. Publish said engine.
Thus Tongues is your own accent.