The course uses the Activity Process Engine, a package developed at City University of Hong Kong in 1998. The APE looks after security, assignment collection and student task management. We are now adding speech synthesis to these lectures for audio content delivery.
Speech synthesis is useful for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the data format it uses is highly compressed when compared with audio. Speech synthesis files are over 1000 times smaller than typical audio .au files. This is especially useful where students are accessing the web site over a telephone line. Although Real Audio and some audio codecs can provide streaming and reach levels of compression of around ten or so, this still uses up valuable bandwidth which could be used for graphics. With the speech synthesizer, even an hour of speech occupies only 24kbytes.