Re: GNOME 2 Sound Architecture and APIs?

[John Heard <John Heard Sun COM>]

Yes Bill,

Bill Haneman wrote:

>
>
> So this project may be the appropriate vehicle for moving forward with
> sound on GNOME.  As you are aware, sound support is important for
> effective text-to-speech service, which is a requirement for
> accessibility.  At the moment just using /dev/audio is not quite good
> enough, aRTS and CSL could allow us to avoid rolling our own wrappers
> for text-to-speech audio support.

One reason for my question is because I had a good discussion with Alan Black
from over at CMU and we discussed how we might bring the Festival, Flite and
maybe also Sphynx projects alongside the GNOME project. Alan was very keen to be
able to achieve this.

Alan is the lead for Festival and Flite. See
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/hephaestus.html for more info

Festival and FLITE speech synthesis tools

FLITE is particularily interesting since it is effectively a very light runtime
speech synthesis engine.

See http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/

If this were to become a Bonobo component available as a utility within GNOME it
could have many applications - one obviously being the accessibility needs, but
even broader.
Festival could be used to generate voice "localizations" for this service

Alan, you might want to comment?

Rgds
John

>