This project should evolve into a desktop story telling prototype. A selected story or fable should be "told" by a text to speech engine, additionaly fitting images should be fetched from google image search and finally displayed to the user. The prototype is developed as part of a Bachelor Thesis for Media Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology.
This project will be written mainly in Python, a text to speech library will be integrated with the image query and display code.
Setup-py is used as build tool for this project. The Text-To-Speech capabilities are provided by the gTTS module. It retrieves spoken text from the Google TTS Engine in Google Translate. To build the User Interface PySide is used, which provides LGPL-licensed bindings to Qt. As some of the retrived Images from Bing could require editing we use Pillow to accomplish this.
Version 0.1:
Version 0.2:
Python 3.4.3 (or newer) has to be installed on the computer on which Real-Time Story Illustrator will be used. For installation you need to unpack a *.zip, therefore you need software for this. 7-Zip is an open source software you may use to do this.
During installation and while running Real-Time Story Illustrator administrator rights may be needed. The reason for the need of administrator rights during installation is that you may need write access to the installation directory. While running Real-Time Story Illustrator the text to speech engine generates a temp-folder with temporary *.mp3 files, therefore administrative access is needed.
- Step 1: Download the folder RealTimeStoryIllustrator-0.2.zip from our repository on github.com.
- Step 2: Double-click install.bat (Note: If you need administrator rights, it will ask you for the permisson.). The Batch-file runs
python setup.py installto install Real-Time Story lllustrator in the site-packages folder of Python with the--record installed_files.txtoption to keep track where the files are stored (which is used by uninstall.bat to delete those installed files automatically). You may also usepython setup.py installin the command prompt to install Real-Time Story Illustrator instead of using the Batch-File. - STEP 3: For translating words the mstranslator and for searching images the Bing Search API is used. Therefore you need two keys: You can get both keys from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace (Microsoft Translator; Bing Search API. You have to put the Microsoft Translator key in a ms.key file, and the Bing Search API key in a bing.key file. N
To start Real-Time Story Illustrator simply double-click on start.bat (Note: If you need administrator rights, it will ask you for the permisson.). The Batch-file starts the program with the start_rtsi command. start_rtsi may also be used in the command prompt to start Real-Time Story Illustrator instead of using the Batch-file.
Double-click on uninstall.bat to uninstall Real-Time Story Illustrator. The Batch-file runs python -m pip uninstall RealTimeStoryIllustrator-0.1.zip to uninstall the programm and should also delete all files which were generated during installation and are not needed anymore.