CST 499 Week 7

This week, we worked on the Capstone video. I spent a majority of the time working on text to speech using Google Cloud. I tried Java since we used it for the past 2 classes, but I couldn't get the dependencies to work and it would not run. I then followed a tutorial using C# in the in browser terminal and code editor. It was clunky and strange but it was able to run the sample. I could not figure out how to enter text in the terminal then run the code.

Now that I understood that it did work on my machine in some way, I decided to try Python. It has been awhile since I used Python but it's simple enough and easy to install the dependencies since its only one pip install line. I downloaded the entire text to speech library from the Google Cloud github since the sample code was helpful but not as in depth as I wanted it to be. Using the examples, I was able to write my own functions for it to do what I wanted: allow me to input text, not delimit it based on newlines, translate it to ssml, and modify the voice and pitch used. I like Python's ability to be simple and easy to write, but it reminded me of why I dislike Python; writing for loops with iterators is awkward. In Java it's easy, in Python its different in a bad way.

This Summer, I hope to finish off the CTI technical interview questions I saved from last Summer. The wild thing about this all is the sister school, El Camino (along with CSU Dominguez Hills) Community College, is from my hometown in south LA, where my sister and I both took classes. My High School, Junipero Serra High, is down the street from there and this CTI program combined with the Warrior-Toro CS cohort pathway program will have a huge impact on the largely underrepresented minority students who go to El Camino from Serra. I also read in the HS newsletter that they even started a coding club. It's all very exciting for my former high school and the great opportunities those kids will have.