Besides attending some talks, I spent most of this day preparing and giving my own talk.
I got a very flattering introduction by Damian Conway, who explained that after his Presentation Aikido talk, several people had come up and asked him to introduce them, just like I did. He told the audience he had turned them all down, except me. If that's not flattering...
Anyway, although there were only a few people in the room, the talk went very well I think, and the people that were there, were really interested in the subject. It showed, because they kept asking questions during the talk, especially during the demo. I had planned the demo to last for not more than 15 minutes, but because all kinds of questions kept being asked (and I was too enthusiastic about the subject not to answer them), the demo took more than 30 minutes. In a 45 minute talk, that means you're running hopelessly out of time. I had not kept track of time, and after the demo I had only 3 minutes left, and slides for 15 minutes. I rushed through the last part, which wasn't a good plan on hindsight.
The good thing is that most people kept asking questions and giving suggestions after I left the room. I actually even got the offer of someone who wanted to help out improving the online help for pVoice. This is a good thing since it will greatly improve the useability of the software.
After I finished talking with the audience, I ran downstairs to the 'Works in Progress' session to do the last part of the presentation again. I had only 10 minutes in this session, and used it as a 'Cry for Help'. Let me use this journal entry as another Cry for Help. I need people to help with development. I don't expect anyone to spend as much time on pVoice as I do, but I hope people will help porting pVoice to other platforms, especially Linux and Mac OS X. It really shouldn't be too hard. It's all written in Perl and uses wxPerl as the GUI library. wxPerl compiles on many platforms (including OS X), but I know I've used several Win32 specific calls, and there really should be workarounds for those calls on other platforms. Eventually I should be able to port pVoice to linux myself, but I don't own a Mac, so I can't do that myself.
The Speech synthesis is done in only one subroutine, so it shouldn't be too hard to make that work on other platforms too. I'm still planning to write a generic TTS (Text To Speech) module that interfaces with the different TTS modules for different platforms. If I find the time. If someone else does it, I'll use that and it will be a huge step towards making pVoice multi-platform.
The slides of my talk (for those who didn't have the chance to be there) are on
