Speakup & Speech Dispatcher (it talks!)

[Hynek Hanke]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 08:05:32AM -0500, Kirk Reiser wrote:
> I will happily outline the command set as I have implemented it if
> that would be useful.  On the other hand I have no problem with
> modifying it to use ssip if it can be used in as simple a manner as
> what I have currently.

Hi Kirk!

Today I finally got to write some simple interface application
from /dev/softsynth to speechd and it talks! :) I have yet
to clean it a little bit and make it to be a true daemon.

I don't think it is necessary for you to describe the protocol.
I think it can be understood well from the code itself and the
documentation to DoubleTalk. I've looked a little bit around
the Speakup code and I think it isn't necessary to change the
communication to SSIP now. The Doubletalk protocol serves it's
purpose very well and switching to SSIP would most likely require
some changes in the code.

I have a few questions / notes about the two protocols:

1) TONE: I'm not very sure what does this mean. But if I understand
it correctly from the docs, we don't have anything similar in SSIP.
We prefer to set such voice properties in the synthesizer itself
(here Festival or Flite), where it's more natural and where the user
has better means to do such job. If one wants to use one voice with
different "TONE" settings, he can create different virtual voices with such
settings in Festival. This is quite different from hardware synthesis.
So I don't know what to do with it? What is exactly the difference
between TONE and PITCH?

2) VOLUME: Currently unsupported in Speech Dispatcher. The user
can influence the volume through soundcard settings and a mixer.
We will most likely add some volume settings in the future, but
currently we have some problems to find a decent sound system/library.
Temporarily marked as "yet unsupported".

3) FREQUENCY: I don't understand what this parameter does. Could
you please explain?

4) What is the purpose of init_string, when is it sent to /dev/softsynth
and what is the expected behaviour of the synthesizer? Can init_string
be sent during the communication to reset the device or only at the
beginning?

I didn't notice any problems with the other commands. They seem to work
right. 

Your Speakup module for software synthesis works perfectly!
Thank you very much!

Sincerely,
Hynek