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

[Rich Burridge <Rich Burridge Sun COM>]

Will Walker wrote:
> 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.).

I agree. The eSpeak Speech API should be handling this under the covers.

So that it's not lost, and also to act as a starting point for anybody
else who is interested in working on this, I've opened:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381322

which is an enhancement request for an eSpeak driver for GNOME Speech.

It contains a couple of attachments:

* Patch to add in the basic GNOME Speech infrastructure for the eSpeak driver.
* Sample program from the eSpeak author to show how to turn text to a 
 speech .wav file.