eSpeak - added punctuation and capitals indications

[Gary Cramblitt]

On Sunday 30 April 2006 08:24, Jonathan Duddington wrote:
> Yes.  I intend to produce a version of eSpeak as a library, with direct
> function calls from a Speech Dispatcher driver.  It would not include
> the portaudio interface, but would return synthesized speech in memory
> buffers, through a function callback.

Good news!

> The embedded commands (and the UTF-8 capability) are a preparation for
> this.  The SSML tags need to be broken down into the lower level
> commands to change pitch, rate, etc.  I had thought that Speech
> Dispatcher needs to do this for synthesizers which don't process SSML
> themselves, and that I might also be able to take advantage of S.D.
> ability to this :-)  But if you think it's better for eSpeak to process
> SSML directly, then that's OK, subject to a couple of problems which
> I'll address with the interface proposal.

We plan to try to provide SSML emulation for those synths that do not support 
it.  The problem is that SSML emulation would lead to delays before speech 
begins.  Consider a really long message (say SSML from a web page).  The goal 
is for SD to do as little message parsing as possible.  Ideally, none.  So if 
you can manage to support SSML, that would be welcome, but I understand it is 
not easy.

> I hope to produce a library version of eSpeak soon, with basic features
> (i.e. those equivalent to the current command-line version), so it
> would be better to wait for that rather than doing any work on a S.D.
> driver for the command-line version.

Since we expect to start refactoring SD soon, I would not expect an espeak 
driver for a while, so there is no rush. :)

-- 
Gary Cramblitt (aka PhantomsDad)
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