Reading from a book with open-source software
Channel: SMCH
Date: 01/06/2012

A demonstration of how open source image-to-text and text-to-speech software can be used to read from a book. 

There is a full write-up on my website: http://www.samhaskell.co.uk/blog/reading-real-books-aloud-using-free-software

I have tested the book reader on Windows 7 so far, but all of the software I use is cross-platform. 

Software I used:

Wget for Windows 
http://www.gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm
Download the Setup option, e.g. "wget-1.11.4-1-setup.exe"
Run the setup to install 

Image Magick for Windows 
Download the self-installer, e.g. "ImageMagick-6.7.7-5-Q16-windows-dll.exe"
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php#windows
Run the setup to install 

Tesseract-OCR for Windows 
http://www.code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list
Download the Windows installer, e.g. "tesseract-ocr-setup-3.01-1.exe"
Run the setup to install 

Espeak for Windows 
http://www.espeak.sourceforge.net/download.html
Download the zip compiled for Windows, e.g. "espeak-1.46.02-win.zip"
Extract the zip e.g. C:\Program Files\espeak

Android IP Webcam
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pas.webcam

I use the following example script to tie it all together (I saved mine as "speak.bat"):

@echo off
call "C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\wget.exe" http://{IP OF ANDROID WEBCAM SERVER}:8080/photoaf.jpg 
call "C:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.7.7-Q16\convert.exe" -density 150x150 -compress none photoaf.jpg photoaf.tiff 
call "C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe" photoaf.tiff booktext -l eng 
call "C:\Program Files\eSpeak\command_line\espeak.exe" -v en -f booktext.txt