Development of a Text to Speech Based Application

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The students’ access to the courseware portal is dependent on successful authentication against the student password table (‘Studpass’) in the database. The authentication is done using student Matriculation number and associated password; on successful attempt, the student is redirected to the home page where ‘courseware’ link can be selected. Thereafter, the students’ registered courses for the current semester is displayed as in the published registration table (‘PubReg’). The selection of any of these courses would display the associated outline in the course outline table (‘CosOutline’) which the student can select to initiate the windows application to read the lecture note. Figure 4.2 shows the various processes involved to read aloud the lecture note selected by the student (This part of the work is done by the windows application).[pic 3]

Figure 3.4 Block diagram for the windows application.

The database back end for this project uses MSSQLSERVER and it has seven (7) users’ tables namely; student password table (Studpass), Course outline table(CosOutline), various course table (CosTable), the current outlined table (Curoutline), Department table (Depts), Student profile view (StdproView) and the published registration table (PubReg). Figure 4.3 and Figure 4.4 shows the database diagram for the implemented tables and various relationships. Figure 4.3 shows ‘StdproView’ 1-N relationship which indicates that each matric number in ‘StdproView’ table have many associated records in the ‘PubReg’ table. The relationship that exist between ‘StdproView’ table to the ‘StudPass’ is a 1-1 relationship which indicates that each record in ‘StdproView’ table have an equivalent record in ‘StudPass’. Figure 4.4 shows the relationship between ‘CosOutline’ and ‘CurOutline’. The tables relate using the topic outline (‘TopOutline’) field in a 1-N relationship this indicates that the ‘CurOutline’ could have several ‘TopOutline’ as listed in the ‘CosOutline’ table.

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Fig 4.3 Database Diagram for Studpass, StdproView and PubReg

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Fig 4.4 Database Diagram for CosOutline and Curoutline

The application developed was written and compiled on Visual studio 2010 and deployed to be hosted on an online server running internet?? (iis) web server. The outputs in figure 4.5 to 4.8 are various outputs at different instance of testing the application developed. Figure 4.5 shows the homepage interface which is the students’ dashboard that shows the students full name, Matric number and a hyperlink to courseware; the homepage is shown after successful login.

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Figure 4.5 Student dashboard

Figure 4.6 is the course display interface. It lists all the registered courses with respective course unit(s) of the student logged in. Figure 4.7 displays course outline for a selected course (COM113) and a dialogue box shown to initiate the windows application on selecting the course outline shown. Figure 4.8 shows the output form that finally reads the lecture note, highlighting the speaker installed on the local system, speech rate and different controls available on the form (the restart reading button, stop reading button and start reading button.

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Figure 4.6 Course display interface

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Figure 4.7 course outline display interface with dialogue box to run the windows application

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Figure 4.8 lecture note read out interface on initiated windows application.

5.0 Conclusion

In conclusion this research work has successfully developed and described a Text-to-Speech teaching aid which presents an audio version of loaded course material; this will stimulate student interest, reduce boredom and add glamour to classes as well as provide students with disability with the necessary leverage to be at par with students without disability. This to a large extent demonstrate one of The potential benefits of utilizing computer based technologies for teaching and recommends that computer based teaching should be implemented simultaneously with the traditional method of teaching to maximum the process learning in our environment.