speechd and software dectalk?

[Hynek Hanke]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 04:55:50PM -0500, Jacob Schmude wrote:
> Has anyone gotten speechd to communicate with software dectalk? I'm 
> attempting 
> to utilize the sd_generic driver to attempt to communicate with the dectalk's 
> say program, but I'm not having much luck. 

Hello Jacob,

first of all, be prepared that the sd_generic output module is a
highly sub-optimal solution. It might work well with the DecTalk's
client but it doesn't have to. For example there is a requirement that
the "client command" must stop speaking immediatelly when the process
is killed. If you have some chance of doing it or getting someone to
help you, it would be much better to write a native output module (as
there is one for Flite and Festival) that would use DecTalk's API.

But let's try.

> The last message I get from the debug output is:
> speaking thread started...

It seems this output module didn't even get any requests to say
something. So maybe your command line is ok, but I'm sure, it wasn't
even executed. One possible cause is that you didn't set Speech
Dispatcher in speechd.conf to use this output module as it's default
module.

If your module conf file is dectalk.conf, then you have to add:
        AddModule "dectalk" "sd_generic"   "dectalk.conf"
to speechd.conf and then modify the following lines in the same file:
        #LanguageDefaultModule "en"  "flite"
        #LanguageDefaultModule "cs"  "festival"
        #LanguageDefaultModule "es"  "festival"
(put the `#' sign before them to make them unactive)
and
        DefaultModule dectalk
to make it the default module. 

Then you have to restart Speech Dispatcher.

If this doesn't help, please could you send me the module
configuration file you are using for DecTalk in Speech Dispatcher?
Also, please could you send me the logfile of a failure of this output
module? I mean the one where you read the "speaking thread started"
message. Please continue posting your emails to this group, it's the
right place, but post these two files directly to me to address@hidden
as they might be large and are not interesting for the rest of the
group.

> I've got the command right, since when I enter the command on the command
> line it speaks, but when in speechd it doesn't work.

Note that you can't type into the configuration file the command as
you typed it in the terminal directly.  Doublequotes `"' must be written
as `\"' and if you split the command in more than one line, each of the
lines except the last must be terminated by a backslash.

> Has anyone successfully done this? If so, how?

I've done a similar thing for the Epos synthesizer. You can look
at epos-generic.conf for reference. But I don't know anything
about DecTalk software.

Good luck & thanks for your message,
Hynek Hanke