Re: eSpeak support in Orca -- what is the best way?

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

We recently looked at making a gnome-speech driver for eSpeak, but the
main problem is that the eSpeak libraries have no facilities for sending
samples to the audio device.  Instead, it relies upon the application to
manage the audio.  Having developed a speech synthesis engine in the
past, I understand this decision because it helps keep life simple.

In my opinion, however, we really need the eSpeak libraries to support
audio directly.  If someone were able to get this going, we probably
could get faster response time and see eSpeak viable on more systems
(e.g., gnome-speech, SpeechDispatcher, emacspeak, etc.).

Will

On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 13:06 +0100, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been working with Gilles Casse of Oralux on a spec for better 
> multilingual speech support in Ubuntu, and as it happens, the crux comes 
> down to support for eSpeak in Orca. Let me explain ...
> 
> The aim of the MultilingualSpeechSynthesis spec is to extend our current 
> provision to synthesised speech in multiple languages right on the CD. 
> That is not possible with Festival because the voices are too big, but 
> should be possible with eSpeak. See: 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Specs/MultilingualSpeechSynthesis
> 
> We also plan to improve the speakup support on default systems and Live 
> CDs using eSpeak, which fits in well with the added language support. 
> However, the main focus of the Live CD is still going to be the Gnome 
> GUI. So we have to support both interfaces, and we want to do it with 
> the same speech synth to avoid duplication.
> 
> But we won't move the Live CD from Festival to eSpeak until we are 
> confident that there is good support for eSpeak with Orca. (btw, many 
> people will still prefer Festival or other synths and we should have 
> good support for those and make sure installing and setting up is easy)
> 
> I know I'm probably stirring up a old debate when I ask what the best 
> way to do that is. I guess there are two options:
> 
> * Write a gnome-speech driver for eSpeak -- How much work is involved 
> with this? Gilles says he is willing to start on this.
> * Speech Dispacher support for Orca -- I know there have been issues 
> raised about this before. Some missing features are mentioned here: 
> http://live.gnome.org/Orca/SpeechDispatcher
> 
> -- Using the Orca -> gnome-speech -> SpeechDispatcher -> eSpeak chain is 
> not really an option for a stable release I think.
> 
> I'm not really technically qualified to have a firm opinion about which 
> route is best or easier to implement. I simply note that a solution is a 
> prerequisite for the multilingual Live CD and the enhanced speakup 
> support. In principle I'm a fan of the speech dispatcher approach 
> because I feel it open up more options for the future such as Orca 
> running on KDE, but if the missing features there mean holding up a spec 
> like multilingual support for a cycle or more then I'd like to consider 
> alternatives.
> 
> I've made a spec describing what we need and briefly mention the two 
> options.
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Specs/OrcaEspeak
> 
> Another question is whether eSpeak itself is feature complete enough 
> (does not  support asynchronous calls ATM AFAIK), but this is mediated 
> by the ability to install Festival or something else post-install. I do 
> wonder how the user community would react to a sudden switch of default 
> synth though. Thoughts?
> 
> Discuss :)
> 
> 
> Henrik
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