Re: Fixing gnome-speech

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 10:57, Olivier BERT wrote:
> > I'm currently working on Speech Dispatcher backend for Orca.  This
> > bypasses the Gnome Speech layer completely.  Since Speech Dispatcher
> > offers several speech synthesizers not supported by Gnome Speech,

Does Speech Dispatcher support something other than Festival now? 
Gnome-speech has support for quite a few speech engines including some
commercial ones with much clearer speech.  Unfortunately one of the best
values and clearest sounding options, 'Theta' from Cepstral, has been
obsoleted by the new Cepstral Swift engine; we need someone to port the
Theta support over the Cepstral.

While free voices and engines are really important, for some users
clarity of speech is paramount, so it's important to have support for at
least the less expensive non-free TTS engines.

I don't have any objection to using Speech Dispatcher as a common
back-end, if there are more resources available to keep it up to date
compared to gnome-speech.  But we shouldn't move over entirely until we
have comparable driver support.  One area where Speech Dispatcher seems
to be ahead is in support for non-English Festival voices, but I think
that testing is the only impediment to using the non-Engish voices in
gnome-speech as well (the Festival API is the same in either case).

regards

Bill

>  this
> > may be essential for some people and the Orca -> Gnome Speech -> Speech
> > Dispatcher -> synthesizer aproach has inherent problems.  This might
> > solve your problem too.
> > 
> > Please, see also the common "TTS API" draft at
> > http://www.freebsoft.org/tts-api.  This is a common effort of Free
> > Desktop and FSG.
> 
> Very very good idea. 
> Unfortunately, gnome-speech was not very stable, sometimes speech 
> randomly stops. 
> And it's true that it will optimize the speech chain. orca -> gnome 
> speech -> speech-dispatcher -> synthesis was quite long :) And so, it 
> must be nearly impossible to debug it. 
> 
> So thanks very much Tomas for this work !
> -- 
> Olivier BERT
> e-mail: obert01 mistigri org
> Etudiant a l'E.P.I.T.A. (cycle ingenieur, 3eme annee)
> Tel: 06 07 69 79 71
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