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.

I am an Indian and I have no God

India has long been the refuge of the world. Great thinkers from all ages and directions have come here to find peace and purpose. In being the shelter of the spiritual world the country has become nefarious. Belittled by the
superfluous interpretations of the world.

This is now a country ruled by mass opinion. It does not take intelligence or hardwork to make a difference anymore. All it takes is for enough people to hear you. When a country's highlight is religion you know as a Bright that you are born in the wrong nation. When every government form asks you to state a religion and almost every other institution has reservations based on religion you begin to question the authenticity of such institutions.

I shall not debate on the age long debate about the proof of God. I shall however comment on the need for him and why I find God depressing. When I question staunch advocates of religion and/or God and attempt to blow holes in their theories they always fall back to arguments that can be counted on your fingers.

I shall address them one be one.

• In God there is Hope.
• For the love of me I cannot understand why we need God to have hope. In my opinion all this sentence is conveying is that when you are down and under all you would do is believe someone will bail you out. What is the matter? Can I not use the brain I have so carefully cultivated during my education and get out of the situation?
• For hope to exist there must be despair. During despair can I not allow myself to know that it was me that brought this mess onto myself. All God does is take a way the blame. I need to take responsibility for my actions and not cower behind an idea.
• We are God's children.
• I am my parent's child. It would be shameful if I gave that position to someone who does not even appear before me in place of the parents that have brought me up? I would not dare to spit in the face of the years of toil they put in to bring me up by saying that I am God's child.
• You have to agree someting is there. Call it by any name.
• No I do not have to agree. I think there is nothing there. That this life is the only one I have. Brought into this world by my parents, I will live for a blink in time. I will do things that shall last longer than me. I will die and cease to exist. I shall be buried and have grass growing above me, water flowing under me. I shall be the supporter of a thousand lives once I am in the soil.
• I shall cease to exis once dead. Nothing other than this life exists. There is no God. We are an accident in this universe.

Hence all I have to say is that we are no better than the mayfly that is born,eats and lays eggs. Only to die and be forgotten. The only thing for which we need to be grateful for is that we can attempt to understand this beautiful world we live in. We can attempt to know why.

It is the unknown which should be treated as God. That God is a god which is knowable. Then the purpose of our life is to know this god. To know why we are.

This society however does not permit us to have a god that is knowable. That would mean that man is alone and makes his own future. It assumes to much about god without having to prove them. Communal politics and putrid thoughtless behaviour among the masses of this land repell me. I can respect a person and their choice. I cannot however respect a man who takes shelter behind ideas without judging them by their own intellect despite being educated. I would rather live in a jungle of animals who think rather than a city of humans who do not.

This world IS. There is no need for something more.
I am an Indian. I have no God. I am proud.

India Temperature Map

Looking at the cold wave in India currently I tried to lookup at the temperatures in the various places on the map. This was of interest to me as getting visual information of the temperatures was interesting as it showed where the cold was coming from.

My google fu was useless as the data was numeric and was simply too scattered.

Python to the rescue.

Out came a python script for collecting and plotting the data on a map of India.
The closer a temperature is to 55C  the more red it is.
The closer a temperature is to 0C the more Blue it is.

With this it is clear that the cold is coming from the "Wall in the North".
It also shows that Uttar Pradesh has been cold a lot. Mostly because it is a lot of open land and nothing to stop the wind from the Himalayas.


If you want to look at the script have a look at the Git-repo.