About ゆっくりTalk

Yukkuri Talk is the result of curiosity. Can you make an English-Japanese translation using shell commands? Yeah, you can, with curl/wget and cryptic sed commands. How do you push the resulting translation into a speech program? Yukkuri talk covers all this.

The program relies on a few main programs:

curl. Needed to send form information to the translation site
NKF. ShiftJIS<->UTF-8 conversion. The translation site and kakasi uses ShiftJIS and Yukkuri Talk uses UTF-8
kakasi. This program is incredible. It converts kanji to kana or even kanji to romaji. Does not work with UTF-8
AquesTalk. This is what makes the Yukkuri sound. The Linux library is downloadable for free and the provided sample C code only needs 1 line of code changed to be usable for Yukkuri Talk.
Excite Translator. The first site that I got working with Yukkuri Talk.

And the shell code that does most of the work:

curl -s -A '$useragent' -e 'http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/' -d 'before=$urltxt&wb_lp=ENJA&start=+翻+訳+' http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/ | grep id=.after | sed -e 's/^.*\">//' -e 's/<.*//'

Three commands are initially run in the shell, in order to get just the translation.

curl. Send the translation form just as if a person clicked the "translate" button.
grep. The whole translation is contained in one line in the HTML.
sed. Strip the html out, and what's left is the Japanese translation.

Next is the actual wav generation.

echo $yukkurisjis | kakasi -JH | $yukkuribin > $wavdir/$wavfilename.wav

echo | kakasi. kakasi doesn't accept UTF-8 so it's fed some SJIS.
kakasi | yukkuribin > wav. The result from kakasi is an SJIS txt with just the kanji parts converted to hiragana, set by the -JH option. The Yukkuri bin file is compiled for SJIS, and it is fed the kakasi output and the wav file is made.

Example flow

What happens to the text you send off

Action	Text value
Submit "I'm charging my laser."	I%27m+charging+my+laser.
curl	gobs of HTML
grep	<textarea cols=36 rows=15 name="after" id="after" wrap="virtual" style="width:320px;height:270px;" onselect="insertDictionaryKeyword(this);">私はレーザを請求しています。</textarea>
sed	私はレーザを請求しています。
kakasi	わたしはレーザをせいきゅうしています。
yukkuri bin > wav	WAV FILE, ＼（＾o＾）／

However, as with all machine translations, the result is never guaranteed accurate. Additionally, kakasi may not always choose the correct reading of a kanji.

PHP source is here.

Support/Questions here.