Thanks for taking the time to contribute to Narrator with Subtitles!.
An Intensive Course in Telugu by Parimi Ramanarasimham is an awesome book for learning Telugu. It covers various aspects of Telugu in simple bite-sized lessons. However, a major problem with learning from this book is that, well, it’s a book. It will help with reading and writing skills, but not listening skills.
My idea was to use text-to-speech engines to listen to this book (which is why I created Narrator WS). But the book is not machine-readable. Text cannot be copied from the book’s PDF (apparently due to custom font encondings). So, I want to (with your help) type the book so that it can be fed to Narrator WS, and other Telugu-learners can benefit from it.
Step 1: Get the book.
Step 2: Find a lesson that needs digitization. You can view the status of each lesson on this Google sheet.
Step 3: Open this Google Drive folder. It contains a Google sheet for each lesson. Open the Google sheet for your lesson.
Step 4:
The Google sheet contains a row for each sentence and a column for each language
(te is Telugu, en is English, and hi is Hindi).
Start reading the lesson from the book.
Add Telugu sentences and their translations to the Google sheet in whichever languages you know how to translate into.
(For example, if you don’t know Hindi, you can just leave the cells in the hi column blank.)
Blank rows (i.e., rows where all cells are blank) mark the end of a paragraph.
How to type in Indian languages:
(Instructions coming soon.)
This web app relies on the web browser’s Speech Synthesis service, which in turn (usually) relies on the operating system’s text-to-speech service. If a text-to-speech engine is not available with the operating system, this app’s text-to-speech functionality won’t work.
Kannada and Telugu text-to-speech don’t work in Windows and iOS. This is a major limitation. If you can help implement other text-to-speech technologies, please let me know.