“Talking books”-a universal aid for information transfer, teaching and entertainment

The concept of a low-cost talking book is under development by the authors who are motivated by their concern for current reading and teaching methods both with and without the aid of the personal computer. While many children are electronic game and television literate, and interactive learning systems, particularly multimedia ones, can be very effective, there are still barriers to the general acceptability of computer-based reading aids. These barriers are largely to do with: high cost, the user-interface, and the lack of personal contact and sharing, all of which are currently better handled with paper-based documents. For example books are cheap, and there is a close one-to-one contact with the teacher during reading practice. The talking book is designed to provide the feedback that would occur between teacher and child during normal reading and are invoked by the child selecting letter, words, sentences and pictures with a stylus. Details of the letter, word, and sentence selection algorithms are given together with digital speech algorithms that enable the speech to be intelligible and acceptable.