[Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system - Page 56 - maemo.org

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skykooler	2011-03-02 , 23:11
Posts: 482 \| Thanked: 550 times \| Joined on Oct 2010	#551

Originally Posted by petur

eSpeak is utter crap It is decades behind commercial offerings.

If you have a better alternative, please post it! espeak is what we have to work with for now, so we may as well make the best of it.

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nordicnurse	2011-03-02 , 23:40
Posts: 7 \| Thanked: 5 times \| Joined on Jan 2010	#552

Originally Posted by MartinK

The modes are currently also used while looking up routes - note how you get different routes when you are in the walking vs car modes

I was also thinking about per-mode specific settings, like: Scale the map to 4x original size, but in only in the car and bus modes, in bike mode only by 2X and use the default for all other modes.

Yes, I noticed the difference in modes while using 'bike' when driving (I just like the km/h display). It just couldn't find route to destination until I switched over to 'car'

Scaling: how about speed-related zoom-level? Set hardcoded/configurable triggers points so that when speed is increased/decreased past set point scaling is incremented/decremented by, say, x1. Example: When accelerating from 10km/h to 40km/h map zooms out. That way scaling is right for situation (and mode

) and shows enough of the map in relation to speed. Maybe behind a toggle switch and if zoom button is pressed it stops speed-zooming. You'd have to re-enable it by pressing button.

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Pigro	2011-03-03 , 00:15
Posts: 433 \| Thanked: 274 times \| Joined on Jan 2010	#553

Originally Posted by petur

I'm doing contract work for a company called Nuance, who deliver the TTS to all major players (including TomTom). I hear their output all the time, and it makes me say that eSpeak is utter crap It is decades behind commercial offerings.

I remember Nuance well of old - after they were borged by ScanSoft (who'd already acquired Dragon) they picked up Lernout & Hauspie when they went bust & they also bought Scotland's Rhetorical (whose superior TTS product they withdrew from their product range PDQ). The old Philips speech division is now part of Nuance too - they seem to have swallowed up virtually all competitors, so they now own the ball park in terms of commercial deployment.

But all of these large companies, now amalgamated, have thrown zillions at R&D over the years, so it's a bit unfair to even make a comparison with lil' ol' eSpeak. OK, it's not Dragon, but It's free, and it's intelligible, it'll do to get me from A to B :-)

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petur	2011-03-03 , 08:19
Posts: 650 \| Thanked: 497 times \| Joined on Oct 2008 @ Ghent, Belgium	#554

hey, I didn't want to sound that negative about eSpeak, I just wanted to tell how it feels to listen to it when the rest of the day you hear these top TTS engines talking

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MartinK	2011-03-06 , 18:56
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#555

Originally Posted by udaychaitanya16

@MartinK
I have the latest version downloaded and the maps were set to google.I wanted to download tiles around 40 kms. From my home wifi I started to download but when i saw the size, i wanted to stop downloading but Modrana froze.It happened repeatedly.

What froze, the device (= the infamous SGX bug) or just modRana, (so that it can be killed from the task switcher and run again) ?

Originally Posted by udaychaitanya16

@All
kindly consider this noob and explain me how to download goolgle maps from gmap catcher.i could manage them to be downloaded but i dont know where they are being downloaded in my UBUNTU system.Plus are there any specifications for zoom level?

your help is greatly appreciated.. regards

I have installed mapcatcher and its layout is indeed quite confusing. You have to click on the blank button under "Query" label (I'd guess this is caused by a missing icons), then you can select "Options" where you can set where mapcatcher should store the downloaded maps.

But I have no idea how to set the zoomlevel range...maybe it does single zoomlevel at a time ?

Originally Posted by nordicnurse

Scaling: how about speed-related zoom-level? Set hardcoded/configurable triggers points so that when speed is increased/decreased past set point scaling is incremented/decremented by, say, x1. Example: When accelerating from 10km/h to 40km/h map zooms out. That way scaling is right for situation (and mode ) and shows enough of the map in relation to speed. Maybe behind a toggle switch and if zoom button is pressed it stops speed-zooming. You'd have to re-enable it by pressing button.

Well, there are few issues that have to be addressed before this can be usably implemented:

zooming up/down for the first time is not instantaneous - it takes some time to show the map as tiles are down-/loaded
this could be solved by faster tile loading, reusing scaled tile from previous zoomlevel or preloading adjacent zoomlevels
the user should know automatic zooming is on, so some form of notification would have to be provided

There is already a feature request for automatic zooming - just add a comment if you have some additional ideas

Also, once clutter is used for the map-view rendering in modRana, animated seamless zooming would be possible, which would make automatic zooming much more usable IMO

Concerning clutter, I've got a positive response from the PyMaemo guys about updating the obsolete PyClutter package from 0.8 to 1.0.
Also, because of the particularly sad state of the Pyclutter documentation, I have started gathering all the documentation and other resources I can find on the modRana wiki. If you find something related, let me know !

@ TTS: Well, I'd say all is good as long the output is intelligible

Improvements would be nice, though. There are those mbrola voices, mentioned earlier in this thread. Also, looks like Festival is available from extras - does anybody have an idea whats the quality of its output ?

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Last edited by MartinK; 2011-03-07 at 02:21.

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jj0	2011-03-06 , 19:38
Posts: 73 \| Thanked: 33 times \| Joined on Nov 2010	#556

Originally Posted by MartinK

@ TTS: Well, I'd say all is good as long the output is intelligible
Improvements would be nice, though. There are those mbrola voices, mentioned earlier in this thread.

Though they sound better, I'd advise against mbrola, as it's not free, it's closed source, not worth it in my mind...

Also, looks like Festival is available from extras - does anybody have an idea whats the quality of its output ?

Yeah, I do a lotta messing with espeak and festival. Generally festival produces a much more intelligible output and better spoken. Its languages/voices are also quite good. So generally, as far as speech clarity is concerned etc., festival is a better alternative. However it is much heavier than espeak, that's why usually espeak gets chosen as a frontend.

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	jd4200	2011-03-06 , 22:58
	Posts: 451 \| Thanked: 424 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ England	#557

Originally Posted by skykooler

If you have a better alternative, please post it! espeak is what we have to work with for now, so we may as well make the best of it.

Is it not possible to use pre-recorded voices, and then fallback on espeak if a certain recorded instruction isn't available?

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skykooler	2011-03-07 , 00:40
Posts: 482 \| Thanked: 550 times \| Joined on Oct 2010	#558

Originally Posted by jd4200

Is it not possible to use pre-recorded voices, and then fallback on espeak if a certain recorded instruction isn't available?

Well...At the moment modrana gives instructions with street names. Trying to record these would be a nightmare. You could possibly record the instruction except for the street name, however that would sound kind of odd, and besides, espeak generally doesn't have much trouble with the rest of the instruction.
The other problem with this approach is that voice files take up a lot of room on a phone. This would probably double or even triple the installed size.

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MartinK	2011-03-07 , 02:27
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#559

ModRana is also getting the directions from Google in plain-text, so even separating the street names is not possible (or at least very hard) .

This can change as other routing providers may supply directions in a machine readable format and IIRC both Monav and Routino supply preformated plaintext & machine readable instructions.

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skykooler	2011-03-07 , 02:54
Posts: 482 \| Thanked: 550 times \| Joined on Oct 2010	#560

Question about that: might it be possible to parse the beginning of the plain-text command such as to extract things such as "turn left", "slight right", "merge", etc. and show an arrow indicating what the next command will be? I would find this very handy when I can't remember the last instruction, but I don't want to take my eyes off the road for long enough to read the blue box.

I believe you are using Python for modrana. Here is an example of what I mean:

Code:

def get_turn_direction(gmaps):
	#calling the google maps string "gmaps"
	gmaps_array = lower(gmaps).split(); #Convert to lowercase and split words
	if gmaps_array[1]=="left":
		if gmaps_array[0]=="turn":
			return "turn_left"
		elif gmaps_array[0]=="bear":
			return "bear_left"
		elif gmaps_array[0]=="exit":
			return "bear_left"
		else:
			return "turn_left"
	elif gmaps_array[1]=="right":
		if gmaps_array[0]=="turn":
			return "turn_right"
		elif gmaps_array[0]=="bear":
			return "bear_right"
		elif gmaps_array[0]=="exit":
			return "bear_right"
		else:
			return "turn_right"
	else:
		if gmaps_array[0]=="merge":
			return "merge"
		elif gmaps_array[2]=="left": #i.e. "Take first left"
			return "turn_left"
		elif gmaps_array[2]=="right":
			return "turn_right"
		elif gmaps_array[0]=="exit": #with no side specified, assume right exit
			return "bear_right"
		elif gmaps_array[0]=="continue":
			return "straight"
		else: #Catchall for other commands that I haven't anticipated
			return "don't_know"

My suggestion is that this be used to display an arrow, sort of like this: