Re: Fixing gnome-speech

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Willem:

That's good news about the DECTalk and TTSynth support.  If we could get
a Cepstral/Swift module as well, I think we'd have the major synths
covered.  Perhaps the gnome-speech FreeTTS code could be ported to the
SpeechDispatcher API someday, to give us two free engines (especially
now that Java licensing is more acceptable to free distros).

I suspect the 'generic module' may not work well for screen readers
because of the need for speech markers or at least "end of speech"
notification, but it's still useful for some things of course.

regards

Bill

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 12:50, Willem van der Walt wrote:
> Speech-dispatcher has support for the DECTalk Software speech and 
> Viavoice/TTSynth.  It also has a generic module through which one can make 
> it work using any synthesizer that can take text on the command-line and 
> speak it.
> Speech-dispatcher is very stable, even when using an unstable generic 
> synthesizer.
> Although the generic module has some limits, in practice, it works well.
> HTH, Willem
> 
>   On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Bill Haneman wrote:
> 
> > 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
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> >> gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> >> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
> >
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> 
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