I ve just released version 0.3 of Pied, my tool for making advanced text-to-speech voices work easily on Linux. This release adds support for models with multiple sub-voices, providing access to hundreds of new voices. It also adds different qualities of model, fixes previews whilst downloading and fixes audio output detection when using sox. It s available [ ]
For the past couple of months I ve been working on Pied, an application that makes it easy to use modern, natural sounding, text-to-speech voices on Linux. It does this by integrating the Piper neural text-to-speech engine with speech-dispatcher, so most existing software will work with it out of the box. The first beta version is [ ]
While developing Pied, I discovered that Flutter s AlertDialog widget isn t accessible to screen reader users (there s been a bug report filed against this for over a year). Text within the AlertDialog doesn t get sent to the screen reader when the dialog is focused. The user has no indication that the dialog is present, let alone [ ]
Recently Canonical have been working alongside Google to make it possible to write native Linux apps with Flutter. In this short tutorial, I ll show you how you can render colour fonts, such as emoji, within your Flutter apps. First we ll create a simple application that attempts to display a few emoji: import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() [ ]
For a recent side-project I ve been working on (a cycle computer for UBPorts phones) I found that when using the QtLocation Map QML element, nearly all the map types provided by the OSM plugin (besides the basic streetmap type) require an API key from Thunderforest. Unfortunately, there doesn t appear to be a documented way of [ ]
Recently Mozilla released an open source implementation of Baidu s DeepSpeech architecture, along with a pre-trained model using data collected as part of their Common Voice project. In an attempt to make it easier for application developers to start working with the DeepSpeech model I ve developed a GStreamer plugin, an IBus plugin and created some PPAs. [ ]
Over the Easter weekend I finally got around to implementing a first prototype of an idea I ve had for a while, which aims to bring some state of the art computer vision techniques to mobile devices. Deep Vision uses the implementation of convolutional neural networks provided by libccv to classify images. So it ll try to [ ]
Tomorrow (Monday the 3rd of March) at 5pm UTC I ll be giving a talk about QML and Box2D based game development for the Ubuntu App Developer Week, details of my talk can be found here: http://summit.ubuntu.com/appdevweek-1403/meeting/22144/game-development-with-qml-and-box2d/ In preparation for this I ve put together a simple template for getting started with QML and Box2D development for [ ]
Overview Rockwatch allows your N9 to communicate with a Pebble smart watch. It makes it possible to install and manage Pebble apps, upgrade your Pebble s firmware, receive notifications of e-mails and SMS messages and control your music from your Pebble. New features in version 1.3 Support for incoming calls and caller ID. Fixes incorrect time [ ]
Overview CuteSpotify makes it possible to listen to your Spotify songs on Ubuntu Touch. It s based on MeeSpot (a MeeGo Spotify client), which I ve updated to make use of Qt5 and Ubuntu s QML components. It s still a little rough around the edges but most of the core functionality is in place now. One particular problem [ ]