Narrated Website that actually narrates

Okay… so here’s an idea that’s really off the wall.

The advent of more life-like voice synthesis means that there are APIs for cloud text-to-speech. They range from natural sounding (like Google’s Cloud Text-to-Speech beta), mid-range (like Mozilla Web Speech [Interactive sample]) to 1970s nightmarish but offline-usable (like pyttsx3)

Perhaps a text-to-speech and some Gramps GUI hooks could be Frankenstein’d together to let someone be guided through our research? So, if a “Script” type Note would read aloud by sending the text one sentence at a time to the API while using the Links in the sentence to bring up parts of the Gramps GUI, you could walk someone through your research to your conclusions.

Gramps would need some enhancements to allow calling specific View modes and datasets too. So you might want to call the animated Geography view for “All known places for one Person” with 1 Event highlighted… or a particular Chart view. (Maybe these could be shoehorned into an expansion of a Book, but as a linkable object?)

This idea is an percolation after a Gramps user lamented that they couldn’t feature a few notable people & events in their family tree. And that Gramps really didn’t offer that kind of ‘tour guide’ functionality internally or when generating a website.